"Accept it, then, my child, with your old friend's love. Use it in your happy hours, dream over it a little, sigh lightly; and then smile to remember that this is your Hour, that you are young, and life and love are yours. It is in such youthful and happy smiles that we whose day declines may relive for a brief and bright space our golden noon. Shall I tell you a secret, before your time to know it? _Youth alone is eternal and immortal!_ How do I know? _'Et Ego in Arcadia vixi!'_"
Mary Virginia showed me that letter, long afterward, and I have inserted it here, although I suppose it really isn't at all relevant. But I shall let it stand, because it is so like my mother!
John Flint made for the schoolgirl a most wonderful tray with handles and border of hammered and twisted copper. The tray itself was covered with a layer of silvery thistle-down; and on this, hovering above flowers, some of his loveliest butterflies spread their wings. So beautifully did their frail bodies fit into this airy bed, so carefully was the work done, that you might fancy only the glass which covered them kept them from escaping.
"You will remember telling me, when you were going away to grow up," wrote John Flint, "to watch out for any big fine fellows that came by of a morning, because they'd be messengers from you to the Parish House people. Big and little they've come, and I've played like they were all of them your carriers. So you see we had word of you every single day of all these years you've been gone! Now I'm sending one or two of them back to you. Please play like my tray's a million times bigger and finer and that it's all loaded down with good messages and hopes; and believe that still it wouldn't be half big enough to hold all the good wishes the Parish House folks (you were right: I belong, and so does Kerry) send you to-day by the hand of your old friend,
Mary Virginia showed me that letter, too, because she was so delighted with it, and so proud of it. I like its English very well, but I like its Irishness even better.
But, although she had at last finished and done with school, Mary Virginia didn't come home to us as we had hoped she would. Her mother had other plans, which failed to include little Appleboro. Why should a girl with such connections and opportunities be buried in a little town when great cities waited for just such with open and welcoming arms? The best we got then was a photograph of our girl in her graduation frock--slim wistful Mary Virginia, with much of her dear angular youthfulness still clinging to her.