"Seventy cigars!" cried out two or three of the girls. "Horrid!"
"You couldn't do it, old fellow."
"Easy," said Ben. "My cousins, Will Larkins and Dan Boston, did it every day."
"They must be of a practical turn of mind, I should think," said Norton. "They meant their voyage should pay—somebody—and so concluded it should be the tobacconist. Lucy Ellis—?"
"I should like to be very beautiful," said the girl, who had some pretensions that way already, or she wouldn't have said it in public,—"and have everybody love me."
"Everybody!" cried Judy. "All the boys, you mean."
"No indeed," said the beauty with a toss of her head. "I mean all the men."
"But people don't love people because they are handsome," said Norton.
"Don't they, though!" said Ben Johnson, who was a beauty in his way; as indeed so also was Norton. But here arose a furious debate of the question, in which almost everybody took part excepting David and Matilda. Laughing and shouting and discussing, the original game was almost lost sight of; and David sat with his pen in his hand, and Matilda listened in wondering amusement, while the negative and the affirmative of the proposition were urged and argued and fought for. At last Norton appealed.
"What do you think, David?"