e Middle Ages.

Nelly was at least five years my senior. But what of that? Adam is the
only man I ever heard of who didn't in early youth fall in love with a
woman older than himself, and I am convinced that he would have done so
if he had had the opportunity.

I wonder if girls from fifteen to twenty are aware of the glamour they
cast over the straggling, awkward boys whom they regard and treat as
mere children? I wonder, now. Young women are so keen in such matters.
I wonder if Miss Nelly Glentworth never suspected until the very last
night of her visit at Rivermouth that I was over ears in love with her
pretty self, and was suffering pangs as poignant as if I had been
ten feet high and as old as Methuselah? For, indeed, I was miserable
throughout all those five weeks. I went down in the Latin class at the
rate of three boys a day. Her fresh young eyes came between me and my
book, and there was an end of Virgil.

"O love, love, love!
Love is like a dizziness,
It winna let a body
Gang aboot his business."

I was wretched away from her, and only less wretched in her presence.
The special cause of my woe was this: I was simply a little boy to Miss
Glentworth. I knew it. I bewailed it. I ground my teeth and wept in
secret over the fact. If I had been aught else in her eyes would she
have smoothed my hair so carelessly, sending an electric shock through
my whole system? Would she have walked with me, hand in hand, for hours
in the old garden, and once when I lay on the sofa, my head aching with
love and mortification, would she have stooped down and kissed me if I
hadn't been a little boy? How I despised little boys! How I hated one
particular little boy--too little to be loved!

I smile over this very grimly even now. My sorrow was genuine and
bitter. It is a great mistake on the part of elderly people, male and
female, to tell a child that he is seeing his happiest days. Don't you
believe a word of it, my little friend. The burdens of childhood are as
hard to bear as the crosses that weigh us down later in life, while the
happinesses of childhood are tame compared with those of our maturer
years. And even if this were not so, it is rank cruelty to throw shadows
over the young heart by croaking, "Be merry, for to-morrow you die!"

As the last days of Nelly's visit drew near, I fell into a very
unhealthy state of mind. To have her so frank and unconsciously
coquettish with me was a daily torment