ion sank just one degree in her estimation. But as soon as she
looked again on the charming face, with its large, languishing Asiatic
eyes, and delicate mouth--just like that of the lotus-leaved "Clytie,"
which she loved so much,--Olive felt all her interest revive.

Never was there any girl over whom every form of beauty exercised more
fascination. By the week's end she was positively enchanted with her
neighbour, and before a month had passed, the two young girls had struck
up that romantic friendship peculiar to sixteen.

There is a deep beauty--more so than the world will acknowledge--in
this impassioned first friendship, most resembling first love, the
fore-shadowing of which it truly is. Who does not, even while smiling
at its apparent folly, remember the sweetness of such a dream? Many a
mother with her children at her knee, may now and then call to mind some
old playmate, for whom, when they were girls together, she felt such
an intense love. How they used to pine for the daily greeting--the long
walk, fraught with all sorts of innocent secrets. Or, in absence, the
almost interminable letters--positive love-letters, full of
"dearest" and "beloveds," and sealing-wax kisses. Then the delicious
meetings--sad partings, also quite lover-like in the multiplicity
of tears and embraces--embraces sweeter than those of all the world
beside--and tears--But our own are gathering while we write--Ah!

We also have been in Arcadia.

Gracious reader! grave, staid mother of a family!--you are not quite
right if you jest at the days of old, and at such feelings as these.
They were real at the time--and most pure, true, and beautiful. What
matter, if years sweeping on have swept them all away or merged them
into higher duties and closer ties? Perhaps, if you met your beautiful
idol of fifteen, you would see a starched old maid of fifty, or a
grandame presiding over the third generation; or perchance, in seeking
thus, you would find only a green hillock, or a stone inscribed with the
well-known name. But what of that? To you the girlish image is still the
same--it never can grow old, or change, or die. Think of it thus; and
then you will think not mockingly, but with an interest almost mournful,
on the rapturous dream of first friendship which now came to visit Olive
Rothesay.

Sara Derwent was the sort of girl of whom we meet some hundreds in a
lifetime--the class from whence are taken the lauded "mothers,
wives, and daughter