ds, recalling their youth or compensating
for their youth's failure; and for some there are the younger workers in
the same field, giving us interest in books or pictures, or journeys or
campaigns, when our own days for work and struggle are over; even as we,
perhaps, have kept open the vistas of life, given Pisgah-sights to those
beloved and venerated ones whose sympathy we value and understand better
perhaps now than all those many, many years ago. Yes! even in our
youthful egoism we gave them something, those dear long dead friends;
and this knowledge is itself a tiny autumn bud in our soul.

There are humbler compensations also. And among these the kind which,
years after writing the immortal idyll of "Dr. Antonio," my dear
venerated friend Ruffini set forth in a tiny story, perhaps partly his
own, about the modest but very real happiness which the mere
relationship of master and servant can bring into a solitary life; the
story taking its name, by a coincidence by no means indifferent to me,
from a faithful and pleasant person called Carlino.

But an end to digressions, for it is time to cease writing,
particularly of such intangible and shy matters. So, to return to
Madame de Hauterive's sentence, which was our starting-point in this
inventory of compensations and consolations. Paradoxical though it
seem, the understanding and union brought by a glance, by words said
in a given way, by any of the trifles bearing mysterious, unreasoned
significance for the experienced soul--or, briefly, "_friendship at
first sight_"--is as natural in the sere and yellow, as love at first
sight in the salad, days. Only, to be sure, less manifest to
indifferent bystanders, since one of the consoling habits which life
brings with it is a respect for life's thoroughfares, a reluctance to
stop the way, collect a crowd with our private interests, and a pious
reserve about such good fortune as is good precisely because it suits
us, not other people.

Reserve of this sort, as I began with saying, is one of the charms of
dear Madame de Hauterive; and the more so that eighteenth-century
folk, particularly French, were not much given to it! And thus it
happens that we know little or nothing about that friendship which
consoled her later life; and must look round us in our own, if we
would understand what were those new flowerings which had arisen,
when, as she says, she had thought herself already in the last days of
autumn and in a leafle