will cover your
heart with joy. Yet she tells you very little. She will give you no full
assurance of the love of Madge; she leaves that for yourself to win.

She will even tease you in her pleasant way, until hope almost changes
to despair, and your brow grows pale with the dread--that even now your
unworthiness may condemn you.

It is summer weather; and you have been walking over the hills of home
with Madge and Nelly. Nelly has found some excuse to leave
you,--glancing at you most teasingly as she hurries away.

You are left sitting with Madge upon a bank tufted with blue violets.
You have been talking of the days of childhood, and some word has called
up the old chain of boyish feeling, and joined it to your new hope.

What you would say crowds too fast for utterance, and you abandon it.
But you take from your pocket that little, broken bit of
sixpence,--which you have found after long search,--and without a word,
but with a look that tells your inmost thought, you lay it in the
half-opened hand of Madge.

She looks at you with a slight suffusion of color,--seems to hesitate a
moment,--raises her other hand, and draws from her bosom by a bit of
blue ribbon a little locket. She touches a spring, and there falls
beside your relique--another, that had once belonged to it.

Hope glows now like the sun.

----"And you have worn this, Maggie?"

----"Always!"

"Dear Madge!"

"Dear Clarence!"

----And you pass your arm now, unchecked, around that yielding,
graceful figure, and fold her to your bosom with the swift and blessed
assurance that your fullest and noblest dream of love is won!

V.

_Cheer and Children._

What a glow there is to the sun! What warmth--yet it does not oppress
you: what coolness--yet it is not too cool. The birds sing sweetly; you
catch yourself watching to see what new songsters they can be: they are
only the old robins and thrushes, yet what a new melody is in their
throats!

The clouds hang gorgeous shapes upon the sky,--shapes they could hardly
ever have fashioned before. The grass was never so green, the buttercups
were never so plentiful; there was never such a life in the leaves. It
seems as if the joyousness in you gave a throb to nature that made every
green thing buoyant.

Faces, too, are changed: men look pleasantly; children are all charming
children; even babies look tender and lovable. The street-beggar at your
door is suddenly grown into a Belisarius, and i