His acquiescence was ungraciously, and I believe I may say
ambiguously, expressed; but it mattered little, for I gathered
up my goods and chattels, strapped them into my trunk, and
waited for the summer to send us on our way rejoicing,--the
gentle and gracious young summer, that had come by the
calendar, but had lost her way on the thermometer. O these
delaying Springs, that mock the merry-making of ancestral
England! Is the world grown so old and stricken in years,
that, like King David, it gets no heat? Why loiters, where
lingers, the beautiful, calm-breathing June? Rosebuds are
bound in her trailing hair, and the sweet of her garments
always used to waft a scented gale over the happy hills.

"Here she was wont to go! and here! and here!
Just where the daisies, pinks, and violets grow;
Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,
Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk!
But like the soft west-wind she shot along;
And where she went the flowers took thickest root,
As she had sowed them with her odorous foot."

So sang a rough-handed, silver-voiced, sturdy old fellow,
harping unconsciously the notes of my lament, and the tones of
his sorrow wail through the green boughs today, though he has
been lying now these two hundred years in England's Sleeping
Palace, among silent kings and queens. Fair and fresh and
always young is my lost maiden, and "beautiful exceedingly."
Her habit was to wreathe her garland with the May, and
everywhere she found most hearty welcome; but May has come and