Il aime, He loves.

It runs in my head like some silly refrain. I meet Bobby. I also meet
Vick, my little shivering, smooth, white terrier. They both join me.
The one wriggles herself into the shape of a trembling comma, and,
foolishly chasing herself, rolls over on her back, to demonstrate her
joy at my advent. The other says:

"Come into the kitchen-garden, and see whether the apricot-flowers are
out on the south wall."

We pace along the broad and even gravel walk among the red cabbages and
the sea-kale, basking in the sun, whose heat we feel undiminished by the
influence of any bitter blast, in the prison of these four high walls,
against which the long tree-branches are pinioned. In one place, the
pinioning has failed. A long, flower-laden arm has burst from its bonds,
and is dangling loosely down. There is a ladder against the wall, set
for the gardener to replace it.

"Is it difficult to get up a ladder, Bobby?" ask I, standing still.

"Difficult! Bless your heart, no! Why?"

"One can see nothing here," I answer. "I should like to climb up and sit
on the top of the wall, where one can look about one."

My wish is easy of gratification. Bobby holds the ladder, and I climb
cautiously, rung by rung. Having reached the summit, I sit at ease, with
my legs loosely dangling. There is no broken glass, there are no painful
bottoms of bottles to disturb my ruminant quiet. The air bites a little,
but I am warmly clad, and young. Bobby sits beside me, whistling and
kicking the bricks with his heels. There is the indistinctness of fine
weather over the chain of low round hills that bound our horizon, giving
them a dignity that, on clearer days, they lack. As I sit, many small
and pleasant noises visit my ears, sometimes distinct, sometimes mixed
together; the brook's noise, as it runs, quick and brown, between the
flat, dry March fields; the gray geese's noise, as they screech all
together from the farm-yard; the church-bells' noise, as they ring out
from the distant town, whose roofs and vanes are shining and glinting in
the morning sun.

"Do you hear the bells?" say I. "Some one has been married this
morning."

"Do not you wish it was you?" asks Bobby, with a brotherly grin.

"I should not mind," reply I, picking out a morsel of mortar with my
finger and thumb. "It is about time for one of us to move off, is not
it? And Barbara has made such a signal failure hitherto, that I think it
is but fair that I should