gent
critiques and reviews of the new pen were looked for and read with as
great interest as the tales.

In a glow over the prosperity which the popularity of the new writer was
bringing his magazine, Mr. White wrote to him offering him the position
of assistant editor, with a salary of five hundred and twenty dollars a
year, to begin with. Of course the offer was to be accepted! The salary,
small as it was, seemed to The Dreamer in comparison to the diminutive
and irregular sums he had been accustomed to receive, almost like
wealth. But its acceptance would mean, for the present, anyhow,
separation--a break in the small home circle where had been, with all of
its deprivations, so much of joy--a dissolving of the magical Valley of
the Many-Colored Grass. Not for a moment, he vowed to Mother Clemm and
Virginia, was this separation to be looked upon as permanent. Just so
soon as he should be able to provide a home for them in Richmond he
would have them with him again, and there they would reconstruct their
dream-valley. But for the present--.

The present, in spite of the new prosperity, was unbearable!

In vain the Mother with the patience born of her superior years and
experience, assured them that time had wings, and that the days of
absence would be quickly past. To the youthful poet and the little maid
who lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by him a
month--a week--a day apart, seemed an eternity.

In the midst of their woe at the prospect a miracle happened--a miracle
and a discovery.

It fell upon a serene summer's afternoon when the two children--they
were both that at heart--wandered along a sweet, shady lane leading from
the outskirts of town into the country. It was to be their last walk
together for who knew, who could tell how long? The poet's great grey
eyes wore their deepest melancholy and the little maid's soft brown ones
too, were full of trouble, for had not their love turned to pain? They
spoke little, for the love and the pain were alike too deep for words,
but the heart of each was filled with broodings and musings upon the
love it bore the other and upon the agony of parting.

How could he leave her? the poet asked himself. His cherished comrade
whose beauty, whose purity and innocence, the stored sweets of whose
nature were for him alone? Into his life of loneliness, of lovelessness,
of despair--a life from which everyone who had really cared for him had
been snatched by u