alled his and not hers.
One morning, when they had bade each other "good-by," and she had kissed
him,--a rare thing for Mercy to do, he had exclaimed, "That kiss will go
floating before me all day in the air, Mercy. I shall see every thing in a
light as rosy as your lips."

At night she gave him this little poem, saying,--

"This is your poem, not mine, darling. I should never have thought of any
thing so absurd myself."

"COULEUR DE ROSE."

All things to-day "Couleur de rose,"
I see,--oh, why?
I know, and my dear love she knows,
Why, oh, why!
On both my eyes her lips she set,
All red and warm and dewy wet,
As she passed by.
The kiss did not my eyelids close,
But like a rosy vapor goes,
Where'er I sit, where'er I lie,
Before my every glance, and shows
All things to-day "Couleur de rose."

Would it last thus? Alas, who knows?
Men ask and sigh:
They say it fades, "Couleur de rose."
Why, oh, why?
Without swift joy and sweet surprise,
Surely those lips upon my eyes
Could never lie,
Though both our heads were white as snows,
And though the bitterest storm that blows,
Of trouble and adversity,
Had bent us low: all life still shows
To eyes that love "Couleur de rose."

This sonnet, also, she persisted in calling Stephen's, and not her own,
because he had asked her the question which had suggested it:--

LOVERS' THOUGHTS.

"How feels the earth when, breaking from the night,
The sweet and sudden Dawn impatient spills
Her rosy colors all along the hills?
How feels the sea, as it turns sudden white,
And shines like molten silver in the light
Which pours from eastward when the full moon fills
Her time to rise?"

"I know not, love, what thrills
The earth, the sea, may feel. How should I know?
Except I guess by this,--the joy I feel
When sudden on my silence or my gloom
Thy presence bursts and lights the very room?
Then on my face doth not glad color steal
Like shining waves, or hill-tops' sunrise glow?"

One of the others was the poem of which I spoke once before, the poem
which had been suggested to her by her desolate sense of homelessness on
the first night of her arrival in Penfield. This poem had been widely
copied after its first appearance in one of the magazines; and it had been
more than once said of it, "Surely no one but a genuine outcast could have
written such a poem as this." I