ay by day I contrived to see my lady.
I was cautious to be neither too hot nor too cold, and never but at my
best in appearance and in conversation. All my shyness I thrust under my
feet: there is one way to a woman's affections, and that is frankness
to the uttermost. I thought no longer, ere I spoke, if this sentiment
should make me ridiculous, or that sentiment too readily display my
fondness, but spoke out as one in a mere gallantry.

At first she was half alarmed at the new mood I was in, shrinking from
this, my open revelation, and yet, I could see, not unpleased altogether
that she should be the cause of a change so much to my advantage. I
began to find a welcome in her smile and voice when I called on the
household of an afternoon or evening, on one pretext or another, myself
ashamed sometimes at the very flimsiness of them. She would be knitting
by the fire perhaps, and it pleased me greatly by some design of my
conversation to make her turn at once her face from the flames whose
rosiness concealed her flushing, and reveal her confusion to'the yellow
candle-light. Oh! happy days. Oh! times so gracious, the spirit and the
joy they held are sometimes with me still. We revived, I think, the glow
of that meeting on the stair when I came home from Germanie, and the
hours passed in swallow flights as we talked of summer days gone bye.

At last we had even got the length of walking together in an afternoon
or evening in the wood behind the town that has been the haunt in
courting days of generations of our young people: except for a little
melancholy in my lady, these were perhaps life's happiest periods. The
wind might be sounding and the old leaves flying in the wood, the air
might chill and nip, but there was no bitterness for us in the season's
chiding. To-day, an old man, with the follies of youth made plain and
contemptible, I cannot but think those eves in the forest had something
precious and magic for memory. There is no sorrow in them but that they
are no more, and that the world to come may have no repetition. How the
trees, the tall companions, communed together in their heights among the
stars! how the burns tinkled in the grasses and the howlets mourned.
And we, together, walked sedate and slowly in those evening alleys,
surrounded by the scents the dews bring forth, shone upon by silver moon
and stars.

To-day, in my eld, it amuses me still that for long I never kissed her.
I had been too slow of maki