mer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid
moonlight, with a dash of icy temper in them, out of a silver vase.
Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human
heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of
nature. The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence
fell. It made him feel--what he sometimes almost forgot, thrust so
early as he had been into the rude struggle of man with man--how
youthful he still was.

"It seems to me," he observed, "that I never watched the coming of so
beautiful an eve, and never felt anything so very much like happiness
as at this moment. After all, what a good world we live in! How good,
and beautiful! How young it is, too, with nothing really rotten or
age-worn in it! This old house, for example, which sometimes has
positively oppressed my breath with its smell of decaying timber! And
this garden, where the black mould always clings to my spade, as if I
were a sexton delving in a graveyard! Could I keep the feeling that now
possesses me, the garden would every day be virgin soil, with the
earth's first freshness in the flavor of its beans and squashes; and
the house!--it would be like a bower in Eden, blossoming with the
earliest roses that God ever made. Moonlight, and the sentiment in
man's heart responsive to it, are the greatest of renovators and
reformers. And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove
to be no better than moonshine!"

"I have been happier than I am now; at least, much gayer," said Phoebe
thoughtfully. "Yet I am sensible of a great charm in this brightening
moonlight; and I love to watch how the day, tired as it is, lags away
reluctantly, and hates to be called yesterday so soon. I never cared
much about moonlight before. What is there, I wonder, so beautiful in
it, to-night?"

"And you have never felt it before?" inquired the artist, looking
earnestly at the girl through the twilight.

"Never," answered Phoebe; "and life does not look the same, now that I
have felt it so. It seems as if I had looked at everything, hitherto,
in broad daylight, or else in the ruddy light of a cheerful fire,
glimmering and dancing through a room. Ah, poor me!" she added, with a
half-melancholy laugh. "I shall never be so merry as before I knew
Cousin Hepzibah and poor Cousin Clifford. I have grown a great deal
older, in this little time. Older, and, I hope, wiser, and,--not
exactly s