is solemnly thought, should they return no more, yet in your memories
the high hour of their loveliness is for ever enshrined. Should they
come no more they never will be old, nor changed, to you. You will wax
and wane, you will suffer, and struggle, and grow old; but this summer
vision will smile, immortal, upon your lives, and those fair faces
shall shed, for ever, from under that slowly waving flag, hope and
peace."

It is so elsewhere; it is the tenderness of Nature. Long, long ago we
lost our first-born, Prue and I. Since then, we have grown older and
our children with us. Change comes, and grief, perhaps, and decay. We
are happy, our children are obedient and gay. But should Prue live
until she has lost us all, and laid us, gray and weary, in our graves,
she will have always one babe in her heart. Every mother who has lost
an infant, has gained a child of immortal youth. Can you find comfort
here, lovers, whose mistress has sailed away?

I did not ask the question aloud, I thought it only, as I watched the
youths, and turned away while they still stood gazing. One, I
observed, climbed a post and waved his black hat before the
white-washed side of the shed over the dock, whence I supposed he
would tumble into the water. Another had tied a handkerchief to the
end of a somewhat baggy umbrella, and in the eagerness of gazing, had
forgotten to wave it, so that it hung mournfully down, as if
overpowered with grief it could not express. The entranced youth
still held the umbrella aloft. It seemed to me as if he had struck his
flag; or as if one of my cravats were airing in that sunlight. A
negro carter was joking with an apple-woman at the entrance of the
dock. The steamer was out of sight.