o me to require some lively
human interest to save them from wearisome didactic dulness. What could
be more natural than that love should find its way among the young people
who helped to make up the circle gathered around the table? Nothing is
older than the story of young love. Nothing is newer than that same old
story. A bit of gilding here and there has a wonderful effect in
enlivening a landscape or an apartment. Napoleon consoled the Parisians
in their year of defeat by gilding the dome of the Invalides. Boston has
glorified her State House and herself at the expense of a few sheets of
gold leaf laid on the dome, which shines like a sun in the eyes of her
citizens, and like a star in those of the approaching traveller. I think
the gilding of a love-story helped all three of these earlier papers. The
same need I felt in the series of papers just closed. The slight
incident of Delilah's appearance and disappearance served my purpose to
some extent. But what should I do with Number Five? The reader must
follow out her career for himself. For myself, I think that she and the
Tutor have both utterly forgotten the difference of their years in the
fascination of intimate intercourse. I do not believe that a nature so
large, so rich in affection, as Number Five's is going to fall defeated
of its best inheritance of life, like a vine which finds no support for
its tendrils to twine around, and so creeps along the ground from which
nature meant that love should lift it. I feel as if I ought to follow
these two personages of my sermonizing story until they come together or
separate, to fade, to wither,--perhaps to die, at last, of something like
what the doctors call heart-failure, but which might more truly be called
heart-starvation. When I say die, I do not mean necessarily the death
that goes into the obituary column. It may come to that, in one or both;
but I think that, if they are never united, Number Five will outlive the
Tutor, who will fall into melancholy ways, and pine and waste, while she
lives along, feeling all the time that she has cheated herself of
happiness. I hope that is not going to be their fortune, or misfortune.
Vieille fille fait jeune mariee. What a youthful bride Number Five would
be, if she could only make up her mind to matrimony! In the mean time
she must be left with her lambs all around her. May heaven temper the
winds to them, for they have been shorn very close, every one of them, of
their go