elieve anything
of me until you _know_ that it is true!"

"I do promise, dear, dear, dearest one-!" I cried, trying to draw her
to me, but she would not permit it. "And you?"

"I shall never misunderstand," she replied, as with a flash of white
inward light. "I know that you can never do anything that will make me
think the less of you."

Since the sad, sad day on which I caused the death of the Cardinal, I
have paid little heed to the birds. The subject has been a sore one.
Besides, my whole life is gradually changing under the influence of
Georgiana, who draws me farther and farther away from nature, and
nearer and nearer to my own kind.

When, two years ago, she moved into this part of the State, I dwelt on
the outskirts of the town and of humanity. On the side of them lay the
sour land of my prose; the country, nature, rolled away on the other as
the sweet deep ocean of my poetry. I called my neighbors my
manifestations of prose; my doings with the townspeople, prose
passages. The manifestations and passages scarce made a scrimp volume.
There was Jacob, who lived on his symptoms and died without any; there
was and there is Mrs. Walters--may she last to the age of the eagle.
In town, a couple of prose items of cheap quality: an old preacher who
was willing to save my soul while my strawberries were ripe, and an old
doctor who cared to save my body so long as he could eat my pears--with
others interested severally in my asparagus, my rhubarb, my lilies, and
sweet-peas. Always not forgetting a few inestimably wholesome, cheery,
noble souls, who sought me out on the edge of human life rather than
succeeded in drawing me over the edge towards the centre.

But this Georgiana has been doing--long without my knowing it. I have
become less a woodsman, more a civilian. Unless she relents, it may
end in my ceasing to be a lover of birds, and running for the
Legislature. Seeing me so much on the streets, one of my
fellow-townsmen declared the other day that if I would consent to come
out of the canebrakes for good they would make me postmaster.

It has fallen awkwardly for me that this enforced transformation in my
tastes and habits should coincide with the season of my love-making;
and it is well that Georgiana does not demand in me the capering or
strutting manners of those young men of my day who likewise are
exerting themselves to marry. I am more like a badger than like one of
them; and indeed I find t