ho_l_d my pen back with b_o_th hands: it wants so much to gi_v_e you
the forbidd_e_n treat. Oh, the serpent in the garden! See where it has
underlined its meaning. Frailty, thy pen is a J pen!

Adieu, adieu, remember me.




LETTER XIII.


The letters? No, Beloved, I could not! Not yet. There you have caught me
where I own I am still shy of you.

A long time hence, when we are a safely wedded pair, you shall turn them
over. It _may_ be a short time; but I will keep them however long. Indeed
I must ever keep them; they talk to me of the dawn of my existence,--the
early light before our sun rose, when my love of you was growing and had
not yet reached its full.

If I disappoint you I will try to make up for it with something I wrote
long before I ever saw you. To-day I was turning over old things my mother
had treasured for me of my childhood--of days spent with her: things of
laughter as well as of tears; such a dear selection, so quaint and sweet,
with moods of her as I dimly remember her to have been. And among them was
this absurdity, written, and I suppose placed in the mouth of my stocking,
the Christmas I stayed with her in France. I remember the time as a great
treat, but nothing of this. "Nilgoes" is "Nicholas," you must understand!
How he must have laughed over me asleep while he read this!