His mind was unequal to a simile, even, and he terminated the sentence in a murmur. More silence; more smoke; more profound meditation. Directly, Charley Burnham looked around with some show of vitality. "There comes the stage," said he. The driver's bugle rang merrily among the drifted sand-hills that lay warm and glowing in the orange light of the setting sun. The young men leaned forward over the piazza-rail, and scrutinized the occupants of the vehicle, as it appeared. "Old gentleman and lady, aw, and two children," said Ned Salisbury; "I hoped there would be some nice girls." This, in a voice of ineffable tenderness and poetry, but with that odd, tired little drawl, so epidemic in some of our universities. "Look there, by Jove!" cried Charley, with a real interest at last; "now that's what I call the regular thing!" The "regular thing" was a low, four-wheeled pony-chaise of basket-work, drawn by two jolly little fat ponies, black and shiny as vulcanite, which jogged rapidly in, just far enough behind the stage to avoid its dust. This vehicle was driven by a young lady of decided beauty, with a spice of Amazonian spirit. She was rather slender and very straight, with a jaunty little hat and feather perched coquettishly above her dark brown hair, which was arranged in one heavy mass and confined in a silken net. Her complexion was clear, without brilliancy; her eyes blue as the ocean horizon, and spanned by sharp, characteristic brows; her mouth small and decisive; and her whole cast of features indicative of quick talent and independence. Upon the seat beside her sat another damsel, leaning indolently back in the corner of the carriage. This one was a little fairer than the first, having one of those beautiful English complexions of mingled rose and snow, and a dash of gold-dust in her hair, where the sun touched it. Her eyes, however, were dark hazel, and full of fire, shaded and intensified by their long, sweeping lashes. Her mouth was a rosebud, and her chin and throat faultless in the delicious curve of their lines. In a word, she was somewhat of the Venus-di-Milo type: her companion was more of a Diana. Both were neatly habited in plain travelling-dresses and cloaks of black and white plaid, and both seemed utterly unconscious of the battery of eyes and eye-glasses that enfiladed them from the whole length of the piazza, as they passed. "Who are they?" asked Salisbury; "I don't know them." "Nor I," said Burnham; "but they look like people to know. They must be somebody." Half an hour later, the hotel-office was besieged by a score of young men, all anxious for a peep at the last names upon the register. It is needless to say that our friends were not in the crowd. Ned Salisbury was no more the man to exhibit curiosity than Charley Burnham was the man to join in a scramble for anything under the sun. They had educated their emotions clear down, out of sight, and piled upon them a mountain of well-bred inertia.