in his hand, take it away directly. There is my prescription.”      

       Those words decided my fate in life.     

       In obedience to the doctor’s advice, I was left an idle boy—without brothers, sisters, or companions of my own age—to roam about the grounds of our lonely country-house. The bailiff’s daughter, like me, was an only child; and, like me, she had no playfellows. We met in our wanderings on the solitary shores of the lake. Beginning by being inseparable companions, we ripened and developed into true lovers. Our preliminary courtship concluded, we next proposed (before I returned to school) to burst into complete maturity by becoming man and wife.     

       I am not writing in jest. Absurd as it may appear to “sensible people,” we two children were lovers, if ever there were lovers yet.     

       We had no pleasures apart from the one all-sufficient pleasure which we found in each other’s society. We objected to the night, because it parted us. We entreated our parents, on either side, to let us sleep in the same room. I was angry with my mother, and Mary was disappointed in her father,       when they laughed at us, and wondered what we should want next. Looking onward, from those days to the days of my manhood, I can vividly recall such hours of happiness as have fallen to my share. But I remember no delights of that later time comparable to the exquisite and enduring pleasure that filled my young being when I walked with Mary in the woods; when I sailed with Mary in my boat on the lake; when I met Mary, after the cruel separation of the night, and flew into her open arms as if we had been parted for months and months together.     

       What was the attraction that drew us so closely one to the other, at an age when the sexual sympathies lay dormant in her and in me?     

       We neither knew nor sought to know. We obeyed the impulse to love one another, as a bird obeys the impulse to fly.     

       Let it not be supposed that we possessed any natural gifts, or advantages which singled us out as differing in a marked way from other children at our time of life. We possessed nothing of the sort. I had been called a clever boy at school; but there were thousands of other boys, at thousands of other schools, who headed their classes and won 

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