oo, poor and hungry, and shivering out the last
breathings of a wretched life; and some of them I will take with me
this night, to my journey's end among the ice-floes and the brown,
driving mists of the uttermost north. Dost thou wonder that I am sad?

"That is thy life. Thou art come from the sweet-scented gardens of thy
youth, thou must go to the ice desert of thine old age; and now thou art
full of strength and boastfulness, and thinkest thou shalt perchance be
the first mortal who shall cheat death. Go to! Thou shalt die like the
rest, the more miserably that thou lovest life more than the others."

The wind is in an ill humor to-night; I should not have thought he could
say such hard things. But he is a hopeless old cynic, even when he blows
warm from the south; he has seen so much and done so much, and has
furnished so many metaphors to threadbare poets, that he believes in
nothing good, or young, or in any way fresh. He is bad company, and I
have shut the window again. You asked me for a story, and you are
beginning to wonder why I do not tell you one. Do you like long stories
or short stories? Sad or gay? True or fanciful? What shall it be? My
true stories are all sad, but the ones I imagine are often merry. Could
I not think of one true, and gay as well? There was once a bad old man
who said that when the truth ceased to be solemn it became dull. Between
solemnity and dullness you would not find what you want, which, I take
it, is a little laughter, a little sadness, and, when it is done, the
comfortable assurance of your own senses that you have been amused, and
not bored. The bad old gentleman was right. When our lives are not
filled with great emotions they are crammed with insignificant details,
and one may tell them ever so well, they will be insignificant to the
end. But the fancy is a great store-house, filled with all the beautiful
things that we do not find in our lives. My dear friend, if true love
were an every-day phenomenon, experienced by everybody, it would cease
to be in any way interesting; people would be so familiar with it that
it would bore them to extinction; they would have it for breakfast,
dinner, and supper as a matter of course, and would be as fastidious of
its niceties as an Anglo-Indian about the quality of the pepper. It is
because only one man or woman in a hundred thousand is personally
acquainted with the sufferings of true-love fever that the other
ninety-nine thousand nine h