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‘Vou. 1.
STREET & S:
MITH,
No. 11 FRANKFORT STREET.
Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1865, by Sraxer & Smrru, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court for the gouthern District of New York.
The Three Lovers ;
on,
THE MAIDEN’S STRATAGEM.
BY MARY KYLE DALLAS,
Lisa Vance was a beauty and an heiress.
Had she been neither, perhaps one man ina
thousand would have discovered what a good-
tempered, gentle-hearted little soul she was;
but, being both, her suitors were as numerous
as the suitors of such fortunate beings gener-
ally are, and she had hardly left the school-
room before she knew that she had but to
_ choose from among a dozen or so young fel-
NEW YORK, MAY 26, 166.
$4
00 PER YEAR.
SINGLE COPIES TEN CENTS,
No, 23.
lows, all eligible as to standing and appear-
ance, the one whom she liked best.
Many a girl would have grown wonderously
conceited and vain under such circumstances,
and Lina knew that she was pretty as well as
any one could have told her. But, despite of
this, her heart told her that half the pretty
speeches and melting glances which fell to her
sharo were of little real value, and that many
of these aspirants for her hand were moved by
mercenary motivesonly, Thethoughttroubled
her, all the more that she had no mother to
confide in and no father to advise her, and
often, when the longing for a true heart to
trust in was strong within her bosom, she
wished that she had been a poor girl, working
for her daily bread, rather than a rich one,
who, because of her riches, could not be cer-
tain that any man actually loyed her for her-
self alone.
She never opened a book in which some
sordid fellow did not strive to win an heiress
for her gold. Old songs were sung on the
same theme, and in actual life she herself saw
more marriages for money than for love. So
that in the end, beautiful as she was, and
wealthy as she was, Miss Vance was actually
unhappy, as those suspicious of their fellow
men must always be,
More than one offer had she refused with a
scornful glance, which said what her lips re-
frained from uttering, ‘‘It is the heiress you
seck, not the woman,” And in her diary,
which she kept as all sentimental girls do, she
had recorded the intention of living and dying
in single blessedness, when there arose upon
her horizon—perhaps at Newport—perhaps at
Saratoga—three gentlemen, who changed her
decision among them, and caused her to amend
it with the resolution to marry if she ever met
with a sincere wooer,
These three gentlemen wero Harry Dean,
George Blair, and Evan Meadows.
The first, a lawyer; the second, a genueman
of fortune; and the third, a young artist, tal-
