like white flowers in the green fields of earth, or like doves hovering: and he reaches down and strokes them with his warm beams, making all their feathers like gold.

Some clouds let the gold come through; mine, now.—That cloud I saw away to the right is coming this way toward me. I can see the shadow of it now, moving along a far-off strip of road: and I wonder if it is your cloud, with you under it coming to see me again!

When you come, why am I any happier than when I know you are coming? It is the same thing in love. I have you now all in my mind's eye; I have you by heart; have I my arms a bit more round you then than now?

How it puzzles me that, when love is perfect, there should be disappearances and reappearances: and faces now and then showing a change!—You, actually, the last time you came, looking a day older than the day before! What was it? Had old age blown you a kiss, or given you a wrinkle in the art of dying? Or had you turned over some new leaf, and found it withered on the other side?

I could not see how it was: I heard you coming—it was spring! The door opened:—oh, it was autumnal! One day had fallen away like a leaf out of my forest, and I had not been there to see it go!

At what hour of the twenty-four does a day shed itself out of our lives? Not, I think, on the stroke of the clock, at midnight, or at cock-crow. Some people, perhaps, would say—with the first sleep; and that the "beauty-sleep" is the new day putting out its green wings. I think it must be not till something happens to make the new day a stronger impression than the last. So it would please me to think that your yesterday dropped off as you opened the door; and that, had I peeped and seen you coming up the stairs, I should have seen you looking a day younger.

That means that you age at the sight of me! I think you do. I, I feel a hundred on the road to immortality, directly your face dawns on me.

There's a foot gone over my grave! The angel of the resurrection with his mouth pursed fast to his trumpet!—Nothing else than the gallop-a-gallop of your horse:—it sounds like a kettle boiling over!

So this goes into hiding: listens to us all the while we talk; and comes out afterwards with all its blushes stale, to be rouged up again and sent off the moment your back is turned. No, better!—to be slipped into your pocket and carried home to yourself by yourself. How, when you get to your destination and find it, you will curse yourself that you were not a speedier postman!

LETTER X.

Dearest: Did you find your letter? The quicker I post, the quicker I need to sit down and write again. The grass under love's feet never stops growing: I must make hay of it while the sun shines.

You say my metaphors make you giddy.—My clear, you, without a metaphor in your composition, do that to me! So it is not for you to complain; your curses simply fly back to roost. Where do you pigeon-hole them? In a pie? (I mean to write now until I have made you as giddy as a dancing dervish!) Your letters are much more like blackbirds: and I have a pie of them here, twenty-four at least; and when I open it they sing "Chewee, chewee, chewee!" in the most scared way!

Your last but three said most solemnly, just as if you meant it, "I hope you don't keep these miserables! Though I fill up my hollow hours with them, there is no reason why they should fill up yours." You added that I was better occupied—and here I am "better occupied" even as you bid me.

But one can jump best from a spring-board: and how could I jump as far as your arms by letter, if I had not yours to jump from?

So you see they are kept, and my disobedience of you has begun: and I find disobedience wonderfully sweet. But then, you gave me a law which you knew I should disobey:—that is the way the world began. It is not for nothing that I am a daughter of Eve.

And here is our world in our hands, yours and mine, now in the making. Which day are the evening and the morning now? I think it must be the birds'—and already, with the wings, disobedience has been reached! Make much of it! the day will come when I shall wish to obey. There are moments when I feel a wish taking hold of me stronger than I can understand, that you should command me beyond myself—to things I have not strength or courage for of my own accord. How close, dearest, when that day comes, my heart will feel itself to yours! It feels close now: but it is to your feet I am nearest, as yet. Lift me! There, there, Beloved, I kiss you with all my will. Oh, dear heart, forgive me for being no more than I am: your freehold to all eternity!

LETTER XI

Oh, Dearest: I have danced and I have danced till I am tired! I am dropping with sleep, but I must just touch you and say good-night. This was our great day of publishing, dearest, ours: all the world knows it; and all admire your choice! I was determined they should. I have been collecting scalps for you to hang at your girdle. All thought me beautiful: people who never did so before. I wanted to say to them, "Am I not beautiful? I am, am I not?" And it was not for myself I was asking this praise. Beloved, I was wearing the magic rose—what you gave me when we parted: you saying, alas, that you were not to be there. But you were! Its leaves have not dropped nor the scent of it faded. I kiss you out of the heart of it. Good-night: come to me in my first dream!

LETTER XII.

Dearest: It has been such a funny day from post-time onwards:—congratulations on the great event are beginning to arrive in envelopes and on wheels. Some are very kind and dear; and some are not so—only the ordinary seemliness of polite sniffle-snaffle. Just after you had gone yesterday, Mrs. —— called and was told the news. Of course she knew of you: but didn't think she had ever seen you. "Probably he passed you at the gates," I said. "What?" she went off with a view-hallo; "that well-dressed sort of young fellow in gray, and a mustache, and knowing how to ride? Met us in the lane. Well, my dear, I do congratulate you!"

And whether it was by the gray suit, or the mustache, or the knowing how to ride that her congratulations were so emphatically secured, I know not!

Others are yet more quaint, and more to my liking. Nan-nan is Nan-nan: I cannot let you off what she said! No tears or sentiment came from her to prevent me laughing: she brisked like an old war-horse at the first word of it, and blessed God that it had come betimes, that she might be a nurse again in her old age! She is a true "Mrs. Berry," and is ready to make room for you in my affections for the sake of far-off divine events, which promise renewed youth to her old bones.

Roberts, when he brought me my pony this morning, touched his hat quick twice over to show that the news brimmed in his body: and a very nice cordial way of showing, I thought it! He was quite ready to talk when I let him go; and he gave me plenty of good fun. He used to know you when he was in service at the H——s, and speaks of you as being then "a gallous young hound," whatever that may mean. I imagine "gallous" to be a rustic Lewis Carroll compound, made up in equal parts of callousness and gallantry, which most boys are, at some stage of their existence.

What tales will you be getting of me out of Nan-nan, some day behind my back, I wonder? There is one I shall forbid her to reveal: it shall be part of my marriage-portion to show you early that you have got a wife with a temper!

Here is a whole letter that must end now,—and the great Word never