st of the passions, and it is impossible for
me to conceive how one who has truly fallen victim to its benign
influence can ever thereafter speak flippantly of it.

Yet there have been, and there still are, many who take a seeming
delight in telling you how many conquests they have made, and they not
infrequently have the bad taste to explain with wearisome prolixity the
ways and the means whereby those conquests were wrought; as, forsooth,
an unfeeling huntsman is forever boasting of the game he has
slaughtered and is forever dilating upon the repulsive details of his
butcheries.

I have always contended that one who is in love (and having once been
in love is to be always in love) has, actually, no confession to make.
Love is so guileless, so proper, so pure a passion as to involve none
of those things which require or which admit of confession. He,
therefore, who surmises that in this exposition of my affaires du coeur
there is to be any betrayal of confidences, or any discussion,
suggestion, or hint likely either to shame love or its votaries or to
bring a blush to the cheek of the fastidious--he is grievously in error.

Nor am I going to boast; for I have made no conquests. I am in no
sense a hero. For many, very many years I have walked in a pleasant
garden, enjoying sweet odors and soothing spectacles; no predetermined
itinerary has controlled my course; I have wandered whither I pleased,
and very many times I have strayed so far into the tangle-wood and
thickets as almost to have lost my way. And now it is my purpose to
walk that pleasant garden once more, inviting you to bear me company
and to share with me what satisfaction may accrue from an old man's
return to old-time places and old-time loves.

As a child I was serious-minded. I cared little for those sports which
usually excite the ardor of youth. To out-of-door games and exercises
I had particular aversion. I was born in a southern latitude, but at
the age of six years I went to live with my grandmother in New
Hampshire, both my parents having fallen victims to the cholera. This
change from the balmy temperature of the South to the rigors of the
North was not agreeable to me, and I have always held it responsible
for that delicate health which has attended me through life.

My grandmother encouraged my disinclination to play; she recognized in
me that certain seriousness of mind which I remember to have heard her
say I inherited from her, an