"Well, a man has got to have a little money saved up, have good health, and work night and day to keep up his farm nowadays," said Matthew. "If my father hadn't left me an awful good piece of land, forty acres of it, with fifteen in woodland, as well as something to go on with till I was big enough to take hold for myself, I don't know how I'd 'a' come out--and my place isn't rightly kep' up, either; I know it. I intend to begin improvin' it this summer. I've got a man comin' to work through hayin' time, I'll get skilled help inside, and you'll see a reg'lar palace when you come back, Undine--_There!_"--and he checked himself and grew red in the face, as he added: "Your front name slipped out before I thought. I suppose you wouldn't let me call you 'Undine,' would you, Miss Berry?" "Well, I don't think it would sound quite proper, Mr. Milliken--at any rate, in public. You see, people might talk, and other young men would be asking the same privilege. I always think it makes a girl appear sort of common, corresponding with gentlemen, giving away her photographs, and being called by her first name on a few weeks' acquaintance." "Would you feel the same about calling me 'Matthew,' if there wasn't anybody 'round?" he stammered. "To tell the truth, I don't feel as if we'd been friends long enough for me to call you 'Matthew'--yet--Mr. Milliken. I am so unlike other girls. Sometimes I wish I wasn't. I am so reserved, so unsuited to the life I'm living. Mother says she must have guessed what I was going to be like when she named me Undine." They were leaning over the bridge-rail now, looking into the foamy rapids of the Saco, as thousands of other young couples had leaned and looked in all the years since the river began to run. "Most everybody round here is named out of the Bible," said Matthew. "Look at our neighborhood. There's Mark Hobson, Luke Dunn, John Briggs, and me to represent the apostles; there's a Samuel, a Josiah, a David, an Elijah, and a Jeremiah, an' by George! there's a Sarah, a Naomi, an' a Rachel! I looked through the Old Testament last evening to find your name, but I couldn't!" "Oh, no!" said Undine, in a tone conveying her idea that the Bible was a rather second-class source for names. "I was called Undine out of a fairy story that everybody was reading when mother was a girl. Undine was not a real woman, she was a water-sprite, and a knight named Lord Huldbrand found her standing in a brook in the forest and fell in love with her. She had been found on the river bank and brought up by a fisherman and his wife. She loved the knight and married him, and after a long time she turned from a water-sprite into a woman, for love had given her a soul!" Here the narrator's blue eyes tried to convey mysterious things to the bridge-rail, over which they were thoughtfully bent. "It is a beautiful story. I'll lend it to you if you like."