You seize your hat, and rush out to breathe out your still grief upon the winds—hoping, perchance, they may waft it to her ears.
—And this is your first disappointment—your first great grief. Would to God—you say—it may be your last!
—Bubbles—all bubbles, thought I, as the wind shrieked at the crevices of the Old Garret again. When do we stop blowing them?—and when do they stop bursting?
Now, I thought I knew what Banquo meant, when he said that the earth, like the water, had bubbles;—
I piled fresh logs upon my fire. I felt chilled, as with a searching wind.
My eyes wandered out at the window. The sick sun no longer lay across the floor. It had gone down behind the distant hills. The swart shadows were at the casement, and were slowly creeping in.
—They had come—thought I—to throw their dark shroud about the Fancies that were brooding here. And I gladly welcomed them, too.—
I buried my face in my hands; and a secret joy stole into my heart, that the Night had finally come.
The Rev. Sydney Saybrook preached his first sermon to an admiring congregation. The people of L—— were astonished; old men dwelt with delight on the excellent home-truths introduced, as it were, amid a bed of flowers—young men admired the eloquence and frank bearing of the speaker—and young ladies, ah! _that_ was the thing. _They_, disdaining the matter-of-fact admiration of the rougher sex, looked forward into futurity, and, as the young minister was reported free of encumbrances, they thought of putting an end to his season of bliss by providing him with _one_ as soon as possible.
This, however, is in strict confidence—they would not have acknowledged it for the world, and yet many of the brains pertaining to those attentive faces were busily at work within the pretty parsonage, altering, remodeling, arranging things to their own particular tastes. One would have that rose-vine taken away—it obscured the view; another would not only leave the rose, but would add a honeysuckle, too—it looked pretty and romantic; while a third had re-carpeted the stairs to the last flight by the time that Mr. Saybrook arrived at “thirteenthly.”
Milly Ellsworth was a very pretty girl, and, therefore, what might perhaps have been vanity in one more plain, was with her only a pleasant consciousness of her own charms; as, in apparent forgetfulness of the saying that it takes two to make a bargain, she exclaimed: