nd your Shelley yet?" I called down to him, as he stood a
moment in the road.

He shook his head. No! But he meant to find it, if he had to hunt
every square foot of the valley inch by inch.

Wouldn't any other book do, I asked him. Would he take a Boccaccio, or
a "Golden Ass," or a "Tom Jones," in exchange?--for of such consisted
my knapsack library. He laughed a negative, and it seemed a shame to
tease him.

"It is not so much the book itself," he said.

"But the giver?" I suggested.

"Of course," he blushingly replied.

"Well, suppose I have found it?" I continued.

"You don't mean it--"

"But suppose I have--I'm only supposing--will you give me the pleasure
of your company at dinner at the next inn and tell me its story?"

"Indeed I will, gladly," he replied.

"Well, then," I said, "catch, for here it is!"

The joy with which he recovered it was pretty to behold, and the
eagerness with which he ran through the leaves, to see that the violets
and the primroses and a spray of meadowsweet, young love's bookmarkers,
were all in their right places, touched my heart.

He could not thank me enough; and as we stepped out to the inn, some
three or four miles on the road, I elicited something of his story.

He was a clerk in a city office, he said, but his dreams were not
commercial. His one dream was to be a great poet, or a great writer of
some sort, and this was one of his holidays. As I looked at his
sensitive young face, unmarred by pleasure and unscathed by sorrow,
bathed daily, I surmised, in the may-dew of high philosophies--ah, so
high! washed from within by a constant radiancy of pure thoughts, and
from without by a constant basking in the shine of every beautiful and
noble and tender thing,--I thought it not unlikely that he might fulfil
his dream.

But, alas! as he talked on, with lighted face and chin in the air, how
cruelly I realised how little I had fulfilled mine.

And how hard it was to talk to him, without crushing some flower of his
fancy or casting doubt upon his dreams. Oh, the gulf between twenty
and thirty! I had never quite comprehended it before. And how
inexpressibly sad it was to hear him prattling on of the ideal life, of
socialism, of Walt Whitman and what not,--all the dear old
quackeries,--while I was already settling down comfortably to a
conservative middle age. He had no hope that had not long been my
despair, no aversion that I had not accepted among the more or