bachelor ever again.

It is the knife-edge moment 'twixt time and eternity.

And, curiously enough, while my thoughts were thus running on towards
the rapids of that swirling moment, the very thing happened which I had
often imagined might happen to myself. Suddenly, with a sob, the
bridegroom covered his face with his hands, and crying, "I cannot! I
cannot!" hurriedly left the church, tears streaming down his cheeks, to
the complete dismay of the sad little group at the altar, and the
consternation of all present.

"Poor young man! I thought he would never go through with it," said an
old woman half to herself, who was sitting near me. I involuntarily
looked my desire of explanation.

"Well, you see," she said, "he had been married before. His first wife
died four years ago, and he loved her beyond all heaven and earth."

That evening, I afterwards heard, the young bridegroom's body was found
by some boys as they went to bathe in the river. As I recalled once
more that sad yearning face, and heard again that terrible "I cannot!
I cannot!" I thought of Heine's son of Asra, who loved the Sultan's
daughter.

"What is thy name, slave?" asked the princess, "and what thy race and
birthplace?"

"My name," the young slave answered, "is Mahomet. I come from Yemen.
My race is that of Asra, and when we love, we die."

And likewise a voice kept saying in my heart, "If ever you find your
Golden Bride, be sure she will die."

CHAPTER XIV

THE MYSTERIOUS PETTICOAT

The sad thoughts with which this incident naturally left me were at
length and suddenly dispersed, as sad thoughts not infrequently are, by
a petticoat. When I say petticoat, I use the word in its literal
sense, not colloquially as a metaphor for its usual wearer, meaning
thereby a dainty feminine undergarment seen only by men on rainy days,
and one might add washing-days. It was indeed to the fortunate accident
of its being washing-day at the pretty cottage near which in the course
of my morning wanderings I had set me down to rest, that I owed the
sight of the petticoat in question.

But first allow me to describe a little more fully my surroundings at
the moment. Not indeed that I can hope to put into words the charm of
those embowered cottages, like nests in the armpits of great trees,
tucked snugly in the hollows of those narrow, winding, almost
subterranean lanes which burrow their way beneath the warm-hearted
Surrey woodlands.

Nothi