city were making cookies for
Sunday, so the Story Girl and I were alone in Uncle Stephen's Walk.

We liked to be alone together that last month, to think the long, long
thoughts of youth and talk about our futures. There had grown up between
us that summer a bond of sympathy that did not exist between us and the
others. We were older than they--the Story Girl was fifteen and I was
nearly that; and all at once it seemed as if we were immeasurably older
than the rest, and possessed of dreams and visions and forward-reaching
hopes which they could not possibly share or understand. At times we
were still children, still interested in childish things. But there came
hours when we seemed to our two selves very grown up and old, and
in those hours we talked our dreams and visions and hopes, vague and
splendid, as all such are, over together, and so began to build up, out
of the rainbow fragments of our childhood's companionship, that rare
and beautiful friendship which was to last all our lives, enriching and
enstarring them. For there is no bond more lasting than that formed by
the mutual confidences of that magic time when youth is slipping from
the sheath of childhood and beginning to wonder what lies for it beyond
those misty hills that bound the golden road.

"Where are you going?" asked the Story Girl.

"To 'the woods that belt the gray hillside'--ay, and overflow beyond it
into many a valley purple-folded in immemorial peace," answered Uncle
Blair. "I have a fancy for one more ramble in Prince Edward Island woods
before I leave Canada again. But I would not go alone. So come, you two
gay youthful things to whom all life is yet fair and good, and we will
seek the path to Arcady. There will be many little things along our
way to make us glad. Joyful sounds will 'come ringing down the wind;' a
wealth of gypsy gold will be ours for the gathering; we will learn the
potent, unutterable charm of a dim spruce wood and the grace of flexile
mountain ashes fringing a lonely glen; we will tryst with the folk of
fur and feather; we'll hearken to the music of gray old firs. Come, and
you'll have a ramble and an afternoon that you will both remember all
your lives."

We did have it; never has its remembrance faded; that idyllic afternoon
of roving in the old Carlisle woods with the Story Girl and Uncle Blair
gleams in my book of years, a page of living beauty. Yet it was but
a few hours of simplest pleasure; we wandered pathlessly