_Boy Sentiment._


Weeks and even years of your boyhood roll on, in the which your dreams
are growing wider and grander,--even as the Spring, which I have made
the type of the boy-age, is stretching its foliage farther and farther,
and dropping longer and heavier shadows on the land.

Nelly, that sweet sister, has grown into your heart strangely; and you
think that all they write in their books about love cannot equal your
fondness for little Nelly. She is pretty, they say; but what do you care
for her prettiness? She is so good, so kind, so watchful of all your
wants, so willing to yield to your haughty claims!

But, alas! it is only when this sisterly love is lost forever,--only
when the inexorable world separates a family, and tosses it upon the
waves of fate to wide-lying distances, perhaps to graves,--that a man
feels, what a boy can never know,--the disinterested and abiding
affection of a sister.

All this that I have set down comes back to you long afterward, when
you recall with tears of regret your reproachful words, or some swift
outbreak of passion.

Little Madge is a friend of Nelly's,--a mischievous, blue-eyed hoiden.
They tease you about Madge. You do not of course care one straw for her,
but yet it is rather pleasant to be teased thus. Nelly never does this;
oh no, not she. I do not know but in the age of childhood the sister is
jealous of the affections of a brother, and would keep his heart wholly
at home, until, suddenly and strangely, she finds her own wandering.