still. After all, there is nothing like the tenacity of boyish
friendship, is there?

I suppose that, to Sir Roger, father is still the manly, debonair youth
that he remembers thirty years ago. In happy ignorance he slurs over the
thirty intervening years of moroseness, and goes back to that blest
epoch in which I have so much difficulty in believing, and about which
he, walking beside me now and again through the tender, springing grass
of the meadows, has told me many a tale. For our promised walk has come
off, and so has many others like it.

He _must_ be dotingly fond of father. It is the 15th of April. I dare
say, O reader, that it seems to you much like any other date, but to me,
through every back-coming year, it seems to gain fresh significance--the
date that marks the most important day--take it for all in all--of my
life, though, whether for good or ill, who shall say, until I am dead,
and my life's sum reckoned up. I awake on that morning with no forecast
of what is coming? I tear myself from my morning dreams with as sleepy
unwillingness as usual. I eat my bread-and-butter with as stolidly
healthy an appetite. I run with as scampering feet, as evenly-beating a
heart as is my wont, with little Vick along the garden-walks, in the
royal morning sun. For one of God's own days has come--one that must
have lost his way, and strayed from paradise.

It has the steady heat of June, though we are only in mid-April, and the
freshness of the prune. The leaves on the trees are but tender and tiny,
and through them the sun sends his might. The tulips are all a-blaze and
a-stare, making one blink with the dazzle of their odorless beauty: the
frolicsome young wind is shaking out their balm from the hyacinth-bells,
and the sweet Nancies--my flowers--blowing all together, are swaying and