lover. Just as she
was dreaming of orange-blossoms for her own hair, her fingers were
employed upon a wreath of lilies for his bier. As she sat in the
church on that dark and dreadful day, the organ that she fancied
greeting her with a wedding march set all the aisles shuddering to a
dirge. And her unfinished bridal array had all been laid aside that
she might garb her graceful form in gloom. As I looked into her sad
eyes, swollen with weeping, I fancied that I could see into her very
soul, and scan the secret pictures she had painted there. The happy
wedding, with all its nonsense and solemnity, its laughter and its
tears; the pretty little home, with his chair of honour, like a throne,
facing hers; his homecoming evening by evening, and the welcome she
would give him; the children, too--the sons so handsome and the girls
so fair! What art gallery contains paintings so perfect? I saw them
all--these lovely visions hung with crape! And as I saw them, I
reverenced our sweet human habit of attributing impossible glories to
the unrealized.

And what about the parents of the baby I buried yesterday? Are there
no pictures in these stricken souls worth viewing? As you pass through
these chambers of imagery, and view one of these exquisitely painted
pictures after another, you have the whole splendid career mapped out
before you. Such triumphs, such honours, such laurels for his brow!
The glory of the life that would have been is spread out before their
fancy, sketched in the fairest colours! Thus tenderly do we set a halo
on the forehead of the unrealized! Thus charitably do we let the fancy
play about the fish we never caught! Let the cynic hush his
sacrilegious laughter! There is something about all this that is very
human, and very beautiful.

And just because it is so beautiful, it is worth analysing, this thrill
of joy that I feel when the fish tugs at my line. I shall try to take
the sensation to pieces, in order that I may find out exactly of what
it consists. I suppose that, really, the secret is: I am pleased to
feel that my bait has some attraction for the fish that I now know to
be there. It is horrid to keep on fishing whilst your mind is haunted
by the suspicion that your hooks are bare, or that they are baited in
such a way that they make no appeal to the fish that may be swarming
around you. The sudden bite settles all that, and you feel every
faculty start up to vigorous life once more.