One by one they
have dropped away as you have journeyed on; and yet your journey does
not seem a long one. Life at the longest is but a bubble that bursts so
soon as it is rounded.
Nelly--your sweet sister, to whom your heart clung so fondly in the
young days, and to whom it has clung ever since in the strongest bonds
of companionship--is gone--with the rest!
Your thought--wayward now, and flickering--runs over the old days with
quick and fevered step; it brings back, faintly as it may, the noisy
joys, and the safety, that belonged to the old garret-roof; it figures
again the image of that calm-faced father,--long since sleeping beside
your mother; it rests like a shadow upon the night when Charlie died; it
grasps the old figures of the schoolroom, and kindles again (how strange
is memory) the fire that shed its lustre upon the curtains, and the
ceiling, as you lay groaning with your first hours of sickness.
Your flitting recollection brings back with gushes of exultation the
figure of that little, blue-eyed hoiden,--Madge,--as she came with her
work to pass the long evenings with Nelly; it calls again the shy
glances that you cast upon her, and your _naive_ ignorance of all the
little counter-play that might well have passed between Frank and Nelly.
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