nging into the wood, I
left him with his Mary. The sun had just set as he joined me.

"Have you ever been in love, Mr. Lindsay?" he said.

"No, never seriously," I replied. "I am, perhaps, not naturally of the
coolest temperament imaginable; but the same fortune that has improved
my mind in some little degree, and given me high notions of the sex, has
hitherto thrown me among only its less superior specimens. I am now in
my eight-and-twentieth year, and I have not yet met with a woman whom I
could love."

"Then you are yet a stranger," he rejoined, "to the greatest happiness
of which our nature is capable. I have enjoyed more heartfelt pleasure
in the company of the young woman I have just left, than from every
other source that has been opened to me from my childhood till now.
Love, my friend, is the fulfilling of the whole law."

"Mary Campbell, did you not call her?" I said. "She is, I think, the
loveliest creature I have ever seen; and I am much mistaken in the
expression of her beauty, if her mind be not as lovely as her person."

"It is, it is," he exclaimed--"the intelligence of an angel with the
simplicity of a child. Oh, the delight of being thoroughly trusted,
thoroughly beloved by one of the loveliest, best, purest-minded of all
God's good creatures! To feel that heart beating against my own, and to
know that it beats for me only! Never have I passed an evening with my
Mary without returning to the world a better, gentler, wiser man. Love,
my friend, is the fulfilling of the whole law. What are we without
it?--poor, vile, selfish animals; our very virtues themselves, so
exclusively virtues on our own behalf as to be well nigh as hateful as
our vices. Nothing so opens and improves the heart, nothing so widens
the grasp of the affections, nothing half so effectually brings us out
of our crust of self, as a happy, well-regulated love for a pure-minded,
affectionate-hearted woman!"

"There is another kind of love, of which we sailors see somewhat," I
said, "which is not so easily associated with good."

"Love!" he replied--"no, Mr. Lindsay, that is not the name. Kind
associates with kind in all nature; and love--humanizing,
heart-softening love--cannot be the companion of whatever is low, mean,
worthless, degrading--the associate of ruthless dishonour, cunning,
treachery, and violent death. Even independent of its amount of evil
as a crime, or the evils still greater than itself which necessarily
accompan