t, soothes like a
caress of angels, and woos you to smiles and sleep.

As the days pass, you grow stronger; and Frank comes in to tell you of
the school, and that your old tormentor has been expelled; and you grow
into a strong friendship with Frank, and you think of yourselves as a
new Damon and Pythias, and that you will some day live together in a
fine house, with plenty of horses, and plenty of chestnut-trees. Alas,
the boy counts little on those later and bitter fates of life, which
sever his early friendships like wisps of straw!

At other times, with your eye upon the sleek, trim figure of the Doctor,
and upon his huge bunch of watch-seals, you think you will some day be a
Doctor; and that with a wife and children, and a respectable gig, and
gold watch, with seals to match, you would needs be a very happy fellow.

And with such fancies drifting on your thought, you count for the
hundredth time the figures upon the curtains of your bed; you trace out
the flower-wreaths upon the paper-hangings of your room; your eyes rest
idly on the cat playing with the fringe of the curtain; you see your
mother sitting with her needle-work beside the fire; you watch the
sunbeams, as they drift along the carpet, from morning until noon; and
from noon till night you watch them playing on the leaves, and dropping
spangles on the lawn; and as you watch--you dream.

III.

_Boy Sentiment._

Weeks and even years of your boyhood roll on, in the which your dreams
are growing wider and grander,--even as the Spring, which I have made
the type of the boy-age, is stretching its foliage farther and farther,
and dropping longer and heavier shadows on the land.

Nelly, that sweet sister, has grown into your heart strangely; and you
think that all they write in their books about love cannot equal your
fondness for little Nelly. She is pretty, they say; but what do you care
for her prettiness? She is so good, so kind, so watchful of all your
wants, so willing to yield to your haughty claims!

But, alas! it is only when this sisterly love is lost forever,--only
when the inexorable world separates a family, and tosses it upon the
waves of fate to wide-lying distances, perhaps to graves,--that a man
feels, what a boy can never know,--the disinterested and abiding
affection of a sister.

All this that I have set down comes back to you long afterward, when
you recall with tears of regret your reproachful words, or some swift
outbreak