reverenced--with the reverence paid to martyrs.

On her part, Julia Anderson had walked on as though she meant to pass
the young plowman by, until he spoke, and then she started, and blushed,
and stopped, and nervously broke off the top of a last year's iron-weed
and began to break it into bits while he talked, looking down most of
the time, but lifting her eyes to his now and then. And to the
sun-browned but delicate-faced young German it seemed, a vision of
Paradise--every glimpse of that fresh girl's face in the deep shade of
the sun-bonnet. For girls' faces can never look so sweet in this
generation as they did to the boys who caught sight of them, hidden
away, precious things, in the obscurity of a tunnel of pasteboard
and calico!

This was not their first love-talk. Were they engaged? Yes, and no. By
all the speech their eyes were capable of in school, and of late by
words, they were engaged in loving one another, and in telling one
another of it. But they were young, and separated by circumstances, and
they had hardly begun to think of marriage yet. It was enough for the
present to love and be loved. The most delightful stage of a love affair
is that in which the present is sufficient and there is no past or
future. And so August hung his elbow around the top of the bay horse's
hames, and talked to Julia.

It is the highest praise of the German heart that it loves flowers and
little children; and like a German and like a lover that he was, August
began to speak of the anemones and the violets that were already
blooming in the corners of the fence. Girls in love are not apt to say
any thing very fresh. And Julia only said she thought the flowers seemed
happy in the sunlight In answer to this speech, which seemed to the