ten, and come December fourth next, I shall have lived my allotted time. My ways have not all been ways of pleasantness, nor all my paths peace. But I am glad to have lived; to have known the hopes of youth and the trials of manhood. To have felt within my soul that emotion which rules the earth and the universes, and which is Heaven's undefiled gift to Man. From books I have gained knowledge; from the lessons of life I have learned wisdom; from love I have found the way which leads to life eternal.

[5]

Old age is treacherous, and it comes to me now that maybe I have delayed my work too long. For the mind of age does not move with the nimbleness of a young colt, but rather with the labored efforts of a beast of burden whose limbs are stiff from a life of toil.[6] But this I know, that there is a period in my existence which the years cannot dim. I have lived it over again and again, winter and summer, summer and winter, here in my quiet country home among the hills. There has been nothing to my life but that; first, the living of it, and then the memory of it.

[6]

It is my love story.

[7]

[7]

II

In the spring of 1860, I was a lodger in a respectable boarding-house on Chestnut Street, in Louisville. My father—God rest his soul—had passed away ten years before, and I was able to live comfortably upon the income of my modest inheritance, as I was his sole child, and my dear mother was to me but an elusive memory of childhood. Sometimes, in still evenings just before I lit my student's lamp, and I sat alone musing, I would catch vague glimpses of a sweet, pure face with calm, gray eyes—but that was all. No figure, no voice, not even her hair, but sometimes my mind would picture an aureole around her head. I have often[8] wondered why she was taken from me before I could have known her, but I have also striven not to be rebellious. But she must have been an unusual woman, for my father never recovered from her loss, and to the day of his death he wore a tress of her hair in a locket over his heart. I have it now, and I wear it always.

[8]

I was of a timid disposition, and retiring nature, and so my acquaintances were few, and of close friends I had not one. My mornings and evenings were spent with my books, and in the afternoons I took solitary walks, often wandering out into the country, if the weather was fine, for the blue 

 Prev. P 4/60 next