rself, the truth to nature, the loyalty to the
American ideal of happiness. He will find that we easily and probably
_end well_, and that we're a consolation and refuge for readers, who can
take heart from our happy denouements, when they see a family
resemblance in us, and can reasonably hope that if they follow our
examples they will share our blessings. Authors can't really enjoy
themselves in the company of those degenerates, as _I_ call them.
They're mostly as young and right-principled and well-behaved as
ourselves, and, if they could get to know us, we should be the best of
friends. They would realize that there was plenty of harmless fun, as
well as love, in the world, and that there was lots of good-luck."

"Like ours, now, with no work and no prospect of it?" he returned, in
his refusal to be persuaded, yet ready to be comforted.

Having set out on that road, she would not turn back; she persisted,
like any woman who is contraried, no matter how far she ends from her
first position: "Yes, like ours now. For this is probably the dark hour
before the dawn. We must wait."

"And perish in the mean time?"

"Oh, we shall not perish," she responded, heroinically. "It's not for
nothing that we are immortal," and as she spoke she passed her
translucent hand through his arm, and, rising, they drifted off together
and left the emissary of the Easy Chair watching them till they mixed
with the mists under the trees in the perspective of the Mall.

OTHER ESSAYS

I

AUTUMN IN THE COUNTRY AND CITY

In the morning the trees stood perfectly still: yellow, yellowish-green,
crimson, russet. Not a pulse of air stirred their stricken foliage, but
the leaves left the spray and dripped silently, vertically down, with a
faint, ticking sound. They fell like the tears of a grief which is too
inward for any other outward sign; an absent grief, almost
self-forgetful. By-and-by, softly, very softly, as Nature does things
when she emulates the best Art and shuns the showiness and noisiness of
the second-best, the wind crept in from the leaden sea, which turned
iron under it, corrugated iron. Then the trees began to bend, and
writhe, and sigh, and moan; and their leaves flew through the air, and
blew and scuttled over the grass, and in an hour all the boughs were
bare. The summer, which had been living till then and dying, was now
dead.

That was the reason why certain people who had been living with it, and
seemed