to show her, two or three times a week. Good Nelly! perhaps she is
making your troubles all the greater. You gather large bunches of grapes
for Madge--because she is a friend of Nelly's--which she doesn't want at
all, and very pretty bouquets, which she either drops or pulls to
pieces.

In the presence of your father one day you drop some hint about Madge
in a very careless way,--a way shrewdly calculated to lay all
suspicion,--at which your father laughs. This is odd; it makes you
wonder if your father was ever in love himself.

You rather think that he has been.

Madge's father is dead, and her mother is poor; and you sometimes dream
how--whatever your father may think or feel--you will some day make a
large fortune, in some very easy way, and build a snug cottage, and have
one horse for your carriage and one for your wife, (not Madge, of
course--that is absurd,) and a turtleshell cat for your wife's mother,
and a pretty gate to the front yard, and plenty of shrubbery; and how
your wife will come dancing down the path to meet you,--as the Wife does
in Mr. Irving's "Sketch-Book,"--and how she will have a harp in the
parlor, and will wear white dresses with a blue sash.

----Poor Clarence, it never occurs to you that even Madge may grow fat,
and wear check aprons, and snuffy-brown dresses of woollen stuff, and
twist her hair in yellow papers! Oh, no, boyhood has no such dreams as
that!

I shall leave you here in the middle of your first foray into the world
of sentiment, with those wicked blue eyes chasing rainbows over your