moment
when her pluck should be tested and proved.

The "publishing" of Cephas and his third choice, their dull walk up the
aisle of the meeting-house before an admiring throng, on the Sunday when
Phoebe would "appear bride," all this seemed very tame as compared with
the dreams of this ardent and adventurous pair of lovers who had gone
about for days harboring secrets greater and more daring, they thought,
than had ever been breathed before within the hearing of Saco Water.

XXV. LOVE'S YOUNG DREAMS

IT was not an afternoon for day-dreams, for there was a chill in the air
and a gray sky. Only a week before the hills along the river might have
been the walls of the New Jerusalem, shining like red gold; now the
glory had departed and it was a naked world, with empty nests hanging to
boughs that not long ago had been green with summer. The old elm by the
tavern, that had been wrapped in a bright trail of scarlet woodbine, was
stripped almost bare of its autumn beauty. Here and there a maple showed
a remnant of crimson, and a stalwart oak had some rags of russet still
clinging to its gaunt boughs. The hickory trees flung out a few yellow
flags from the ends of their twigs, but the forests wore a tattered and
dishevelled look, and the withered leaves that lay in dried heaps upon
the frozen ground, driven hither and thither by every gust of the north
wind, gave the unthinking heart a throb of foreboding. Yet the glad
summer labor of those same leaves was finished according to the law
that governed them, and the fruit was theirs and the seed for the coming
year. No breeze had been strong enough to shake them from the tree till
they were ready to forsake it. Now they had severed the bond that had
held them so tightly and fluttered down to give the earth all their
season's earnings. On every hillside, in every valley and glen, the
leaves that had made the summer landscape beautiful, lay contentedly:

"Where the rain might rain upon them,
Where the sun might shine upon them,
Where the wind might sigh upon them,
And the snow might die upon them."

Brown, withered, dead, buried in snow they might be, yet they were
ministering to all the leaves of the next spring-time, bequeathing to
them in turn the beauty that had been theirs; the leafy canopies for
countless song birds, the grateful shade for man and beast.

Young love thought little of Nature's miracles, and hearts that beat
high and fast were warm e