ite as new fallen snow. When the matting had been laid,
Eddie took her beautiful worn hands in his and kissed first one and then
the other.

"No more scrubbing of the sitting-room floor, dear hands," he playfully
said.

In addition to the matting there were in the way of furnishings only a
few chairs, some book-shelves, a picture or two, vases for flowers, some
sea-shells, and, of course, Edgar's desk. Above the desk hung the
pencil-sketch of "Helen" from which somehow, he was always able to draw
inspiration. Sometimes the wings of his imagination would droop, his pen
would halt. In desperation he would look up at the picture.--Could it be
(he would ask himself) that her spirit had come to dwell in this
representation of her which he had made from memory? Her eyes seemed to
look at him through the eyes in the picture--the past came back to him
as it sometimes did when the mingled scent of magnolias and roses on
the summer night air placed him back beneath her window.

From this portrait of the lovely dead upon the wall, from the miniature
of the lovely dead that he carried always next his heart, and from the
lovely being who walked, in life, by his side, but toward whose bosom
death had this long time pointed a warning finger, came all his
inspiration in the new, as in each of the old homes.

Upstairs, close under the sloping roof, was the bare bed-room, barer
than the one below--for there was no checked matting upon the floor, and
there were only such pieces of furniture as were an absolute necessity;
but against a small window in the end of the room leaned a great
cherry-tree. The windows were open and the faint fragrance of the
blossoms floated in with the song and gossip of the nesting birds. Edgar
and Virginia laughed together like happy children and told each other
that they would "play" that their room under the roof was a nest in the
tree--which was so much more poetical than living in an attic.

And roundabout the cottage on the green hill, with its screen of
blossoming cherry trees and (hardby) its dusky grove of Heaven-kissing
pines, and its views of the river and walk leading to the stone-arched
bridge, the three who lived for each other only had erelong
reconstructed the wonderful dream-valley--the Valley of the Many-Colored
Grass.

And the cottage at Fordham became a Mecca to the "literati of New York,"
even as the cottage at Spring Garden had been a Mecca to the literati of
Philadelphia. Among thos