lain, but then--well, she
had come from India. She had all the romance of India's coral strand about
her, and it was India's coral strand that I was in love with. Moreover, she
was a soldier's daughter, and to be a soldier's daughter was, next to being
a soldier, the noblest thing in the world. For that was about the time
when, under the inspiration of _The Story of the Hundred Days_, I had set
out with a bag containing a nightshirt and a toothbrush to enlist in the
Black Watch. (It was a forlorn adventure that went no further than the
railway station.) Finally she had given me, as a token of her love, _Poor
Little Gaspard's Drum_, wherein I read of Napoleon and the Egyptian desert,
and, above all, of the Mamelukes. How that word thrilled me! "The
Mamelukes!" What could one do but fall in love with a girl who used such
incantations?

But this is not the true calf love. That comes with the down upon the lip.
People laugh at "calf love," but one might as well laugh at the wonder of
dawn or the coming of spring. When David Copperfield fell in love with the
eldest Miss Larkins, he was really in love with the opening universe, and
the eldest Miss Larkins happened to be the only available lightning
conductor for his emotion.

The important thing is that you should contract "calf love" while you are
young. It is like the measles, which is harmless enough in childhood, but
apt to be dangerous when you are grown up. The "calf love" of an elderly
man is always a disaster. Hence the saying, "There's no fool like an old
fool." An elderly man should not _fall_ in love. He should walk into it. He
should survey the ground carefully as Mr. Barkis did. That admirable man
took the business of falling in love seriously:

"'So she makes,' said Mr. Barkis, after a long interval of reflection, 'all
the apple parsties, and does all the cooking, do she?'

"I replied that such was the fact.

"'Well, I'll tell you what,' said Mr. Barkis. 'P'raps you might be writin'
to her?'

"'I shall certainly write to her,' I rejoined.

"'Ah!' he said, slowly turning his eyes towards me. 'Well! If you was
writin' to her, p'raps you'd recollect to say that Barkis was willin',
would you?'"

This is a model of caution in the art of middle-aged love-making. The
mistake of the "Northern Farmer" was that he applied the same middle-aged
caution to youth. "Doaent thou marry for munny; but goae wheer munny is," he
said to his son Sammy, who wanted to marry th