BOYHOOD. 13 



master and minister frown, for he grudged not to the boy he loved 

 the remnant of the dream about to be rolled away like the dawn's 

 rosy clouds. We demanded with our eye — not with our voice — 

 one long holiday throughout that our last autumn, on to the pale 

 farewell blossoms of the Christmas rose. With our rod we went 

 earlier to the loch or river ; but we had not known thoroughly our 

 own soul — for now we angled less passionately, less perseveringly, 

 than was our wont of yore, sitting in a pensive, a melancholy, a 

 miserable dream, by the dashing waterfall or the murmuring wave. 

 With our gun we plunged earlier in the morning into the forest, 

 and we returned later at eve; but less earnest, less eager, were we 

 to hear the cushat's moan from his yew-tree — to see the hawk's 

 shadow on the glade, as he hung aloft on the sky. A thousand 

 dead thoughts came to life again in the gloom of the woods, and 

 we sometimes did wring our hands in an agony of grief, to know 

 that our eyes should not behold the birch-tree brightening there 

 with another spring. 



" Then every visit we paid to cottage or to shieling was felt to 

 be a farewell ; there was something mournful in the smiles on the 

 sweet faces of the ruddy rustics, with their silken snoods, to whom 

 we used to whisper harmless love-meanings, in which there was no 

 guile. We regarded the solemn toil-and-care-worn countenances 

 of the old with a profounder emotion than had ever touched our 

 hearts in the hour of our more thoughtless joy ; and the whole life 

 of those dwellers among the woods, and the moors, and the moun- 

 tains, seemed to us far more affecting now that we saw deeper into 

 it, in the light of a melancholy sprung from the conviction that the 

 time was close at hand when we should mingle with it no more. 

 The thoughts that possessed our most secret bosom failed not by 

 the least observant to be discovered in our open eyes. They who 

 had liked us before, now loved us ; our faults, our follies, the inso- 

 lences of our reckless boyhood, were all forgotten ; whatever had 

 been our sins, pride towards the poor was never among the num- 

 ber; we had shunned not stooping our head beneath the humblest 

 lintel ; our mite had been given to the widow who had lost her 

 own ; quarrelsome with the young we might sometimes have been, 

 for boyhood is soon heated, and boils before a defying eye ; but in 

 one thing at least we were Spartans — we revered the head of old 

 age. 



