lively
human interest to save them from wearisome didactic dulness. What could
be more natural than that love should find its way among the young
people who helped to make up the circle gathered around the table?
Nothing is older than the story of young love. Nothing is newer than
that same old story. A bit of gilding here and there has a wonderful
effect in enlivening a landscape or an apartment. Napoleon consoled the
Parisians in their year of defeat by gilding the dome of the Invalides.
Boston has glorified her State House and herself at the expense of a
few sheets of gold leaf laid on the dome, which shines like a sun in
the eyes of her citizens, and like a star in those of the approaching
traveller. I think the gilding of a love-story helped all three of
these earlier papers. The same need I felt in the series of papers just
closed. The slight incident of Delilah's appearance and disappearance
served my purpose to some extent. But what should I do with Number Five?
The reader must follow out her career for himself. For myself, I think
that she and the Tutor have both utterly forgotten the difference of
their years in the fascination of intimate intercourse. I do not believe
that a nature so large, so rich in affection, as Number Five's is going
to fall defeated of its best inheritance of life, like a vine which
finds no support for its tendrils to twine around, and so creeps along
the ground from which nature meant that love should lift it. I feel as
if I ought to follow these two personages of my sermonizing story until
they come together or separate, to fade, to wither,--perhaps to die, at
last, of something like what the doctors call heart-failure, but which
might more truly be called heart-starvation. When I say die, I do not
mean necessarily the death that goes into the obituary column. It
may come to that, in one or both; but I think that, if they are
never united, Number Five will outlive the Tutor, who will fall into
melancholy ways, and pine and waste, while she lives along, feeling all
the time that she has cheated herself of happiness. I hope that is
not going to be their fortune, or misfortune. Vieille fille fait jeune
mariee. What a youthful bride Number Five would be, if she could only
make up her mind to matrimony! In the mean time she must be left with
her lambs all around her. May heaven temper the winds to them, for they
have been shorn very close, every one of them, of their golden fleece of
aspi