Morning brings back to me the past; and the past brings up not only its actualities, not only its events and memories, but—stranger still—what might have been. Every little circumstance which dawns on the awakened memory is traced not only to its actual, but to its possible issues.
What a wide world that makes of the past! a great and gorgeous—a rich and holy world! Your fancy fills it up artist-like; the darkness is mellowed off into soft shades; the bright spots are veiled in the sweet atmosphere of distance; and fancy and memory together make up a rich dreamland of the past.
And now, as I go on to trace upon paper some of the visions that float across that dreamland of the morning—I will not—I can not say how much comes fancywise, and how much from this vaulting memory. Of this, the kind reader shall himself be judge.
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ISABEL AND I—she is my cousin, and is seven years old, and I am ten—are sitting together on the bank of the stream, under an oak tree that leans half way over to the water. I am much stronger than she, and taller by a head. I hold in my hands a little alder rod, with which I am fishing for the roach and minnows that play in the pool below us.
She is watching the cork tossing on the water, or playing with the captured fish that lie upon the bank. She has auburn ringlets that fall down upon her shoulders; and her straw hat lies back upon them, held only by the strip of ribbon that passes under her chin. But the sun does not shine upon her head; for the oak tree above us is full of leaves; and only here and there a dimple of the sunlight plays upon the pool, where I am fishing.
Her eye is hazel and bright; and now and then she turns it on me with a look of girlish curiosity, as I lift up my rod—and again in playful menace, as she grasps in her little fingers one of the dead fish and threatens to throw it back upon the stream. Her little feet hang over the edge of the bank; and from time to time she reaches down to dip her toe in the water; and laughs a girlish laugh of defiance, as I scold her for frightening away the fishes.