the most critical moment somebody suddenly opened
the door and said, "Emily, you're wanted," in a sepulchral tone that
gave one the idea the police had come for her. All the tender words
she said to me and all the beautiful things I said to her are utterly
forgotten.

Life altogether is but a crumbling ruin when we turn to look behind: a
shattered column here, where a massive portal stood; the broken shaft
of a window to mark my lady's bower; and a moldering heap of blackened
stones where the glowing flames once leaped, and over all the tinted
lichen and the ivy clinging green.

For everything looms pleasant through the softening haze of time. Even
the sadness that is past seems sweet. Our boyish days look very merry to
us now, all nutting, hoop, and gingerbread. The snubbings and toothaches
and the Latin verbs are all forgotten--the Latin verbs especially. And
we fancy we were very happy when we were hobbledehoys and loved; and we
wish that we could love again. We never think of the heartaches, or the
sleepless nights, or the hot dryness of our throats, when she said she
could never be anything to us but a sister--as if any man wanted more
sisters!

Yes, it is the brightness, not the darkness, that we see when we look
back. The sunshine casts no shadows on the past. The road that we have
traversed stretches very fair behind us. We see not the sharp stones. We
dwell but on the roses by the wayside, and the strong briers that stung
us are, to our distant eyes, but gentle tendrils waving in the wind. God
be thanked that it is so--that the ever-lengthening chain of memory has
only pleasant links, and that the bitterness and sorrow of to-day are
smiled at on the morrow.

It seems as though the brightest side of everything were also its
highest and best, so that as our little lives sink back behind us into
the dark sea of forgetfulness, all that which is the lightest and the
most gladsome is the last to sink, and stands above the waters, long in
sight, when the angry thoughts and smarting pain are buried deep below
the waves and trouble us no more.

It is this glamour of the past, I suppose, that makes old folk talk so
much nonsense about the days when they were young. The world appears to
have been a very superior sort of place then, and things were more
like what they ought to be. Boys were boys then, and girls were very
different. Also winters were something like winters, and summers not
at all the wretched-things w