ic shape; neat waiters in white
aprons; luxurious lounges; and, to crown them all with the very height
of your pride,--the elegant Laura, the mistress, and the guardian of
your soul, moving amid the scene like a new Duchess of Valliere!

You catch chance sights here and there of the blue-eyed Madge: you see
her in her mother's household, the earnest and devoted daughter,--gliding
gracefully about her mother's cottage, the very type of gentleness and of
duty. Yet withal there are sparks of spirit in her that pique your pride,
lofty as it is. You offer flowers, which she accepts with a kind smile,
not of coquetry, but of simplest thankfulness. She is not the girl to
gratify your vanity with any half-show of tenderness. And if there lived
ever in her heart an old girlish liking for the schoolboy Clarence, it is
all gone before the romantic lover of the elegant Laura; or at most it
lies in some obscure corner of her soul, never to be brought to light.

You enter upon the new pursuits, which your father has advised, with a
lofty consciousness, not only of the strength of your mind, but of your
heart. You relieve your opening professional study with long letters to
Miss Dalton, full of Shakspearean compliments, and touched off with very
dainty elaboration. And you receive pleasant, gossiping notes in
answer,--full of quotations, but meaning very little.

Youth is in a grand flush, like the hot days of ending summer; and
pleasant dreams thrall your spirit, like the smoky atmosphere that
bathes the landscape of an August day. Hope rides high in the heavens,
as when the summer sun mounts nearest to the zenith. Youth feels the
fulness of maturity before the second season of life is ended; yet is it
a vain maturity, and all the glow is deceitful. Those fruits that ripen
in summer do not last. They are sweet; they are glowing with gold; but
they melt with a luscious sweetness upon the lip. They do not give that
strength and nutriment which will bear a man bravely through the coming
chills of winter.

* * * * *

The last scene of summer changes now to the cobwebbed ceiling of an
attorney's office. Books of law, scattered ingloriously at your elbow,
speak dully to the flush of your vanities. You are seated at your
side-desk, where you have wrought at those heavy, mechanic labors of
drafting which go before a knowledge of your craft.

A letter is by you, which you regard with strange feelings: it is