he silence of the sweet spring day. I laid down my pen, pushed
my scattered sheets into the portfolio, covered the inkstand, and laid
my hand in hers. "Not to-morrow," I said, "not to-morrow. Let us go
now."

II

Now go we in content
To liberty and not to banishment.

I have sometimes entertained myself by trying to imagine the
impressions which our modern life would make upon some sensitive mind
of a remote age. I have fancied myself rambling about New York with
Montaigne, and taking note of his shrewd, satirical comment. I can
hardly imagine him expressing any feeling of surprise, much less any
sentiment of admiration; but I am confident that under a masque of
ironical self-complacency the old Gascon would find it difficult to
repress his astonishment, and still more difficult to adjust his mind
to evident and impressive changes. I have ventured at times to imagine
myself in the company of another more remote and finely organised
spirit of the past, and pictured to myself the keen, dispassionate
criticism of Pericles on the things of modern habit and creation; I
have listened to his luminous interpretations of the changed conditions
which he saw about him; I have noted his unconcern toward the merely
material advances of society, his penetrative insight into its
intellectual and moral developments. A mind so capacious and open, a
nature so trained and poised, could not be otherwise than
self-contained and calm even in the presence of changes so vast and
manifold as those which have transformed society since the days of the
great Athenian; but even he could not be quite unmoved if brought face
to face with a life so unlike that with which he had been familiar;
there must come, even to one who feels the mastery of the soul over all
conditions, a certain sense of wonder and awe.

It was with some such feeling that Rosalind and I found ourselves in
the Forest of Arden. The journey was so soon accomplished that we had
no time to accustom ourselves to the changes between the country we had
left and that to which we had come. We had always fancied that the
road would be long and hard, and that we should arrive worn and spent
with the fatigues of travel. We were astonished and delighted when we
suddenly discovered that we were within the boundaries of the Forest
long before we had begun to think of the end of our journey. We had
said nothing to each other by the way: our thoughts were so busy that
w