The solutions of the 1st prize winners were perfect; those of the 2nd prize winners only failed to give the form of the verse correctly. The solutions very highly commended placed the quotation marks wrongly but gave the form properly; those highly commended were incorrect in both respects, while those in the last list contained trifling errors in other ways. "Wisely" and "rightly" often took the place of _sagely_ in line 11. The picture represents a sage, and though sages are often wise there was no necessity to go so deeply into the matter to obtain a good reading. "Rightly" is altogether wrong. To _Violet_ and others. The "O" in the solution of Fluctuations should have been Oh. GIRLS AS I HAVE KNOWN THEM. BY ELSA D'ESTERRE KEELING, Author of "Old Maids and Young." PART I. THE SENTIMENTAL GIRL. This is the girl who has "dear five hundred friends," to borrow a phrase from Cowper, and whose friendship divided among so many yields so small a part to each that Coleridge will not call it friendship, but calls it "a feminine friendism." This is the girl who kisses other girls with an indiscriminateness which made a man say lately, "It makes men envious." To which--alack and alas!--the answer made was, "It's meant to do that!" This is the girl who uses words of the kind that Oliver Wendell Holmes called "highly oxygenated," but which are, if the plain truth be said of them, the weak expression of weak feeling. This is the girl who, even when she is least impious, may forget that only the Divinity should be adored; who is never without what a witty woman writer has called "a gentle sorrow"; whose favourite words are "so" and "oh"; and who writes at an early age a novel the heroine of which--I quote from a manuscript beside me--has "hair of the colour of Aventurine glass, of a lovely brownish-red tint with golden flashes in it," which hair turns white with fright in a single night. [Illustration: GOLDEN FLASHES] This is the girl who sometimes lays herself open to the terrible charge levelled by a writer on the emotions at Sterne and Byron and others of the school of literature to which they belonged. Says Professor Bain, "Some of the sentimental writers, such as Sterne and Byron, seem to have had their capacities of tenderness excited only by ideal objects, and to have been very hard-hearted towards real persons." This is the girl who said dolefully the other day, "Oh, yes, one meets heaps of men, but they don't propose!" Concerning which speech one can only say that it might with advantage have been left unmade. This, finally, is the girl whose letters show up the untenability of Miss Bingley's rule, as set forth in Jane Austen's novel _Pride and Prejudice_. "It is a rule with me"--so said Miss Bingley--"that a person who can write a long letter with ease cannot write ill."