, so I, wrapped around by the glory of my land, may find
myself niched into a fame which my unattended and naked merit could
never have claimed."

Halicarnassus was a little stunned, but presently recovering himself,
suggested that I had travelled enough already to make out a quite
sizable book.

"Travelled!" I said, looking him steadily in the face,--"travelled! I
went once up to Tudiz huckleberrying; and once, when there was a
freshet, you took a superannuated broom and paddled me around the
orchard in a leaky pig's-trough!"

He could not deny it; so he laughed, and said,--

"Ah, well!--ah, well! Suit yourself. Take your trunk and pitch into
Vesuvius, if you like. I won't stand in your way."

His acquiescence was ungraciously, and I believe I may say ambiguously,
expressed; but it mattered little, for I gathered up my goods and
chattels, strapped them into my trunk, and waited for the summer to
send us on our way rejoicing,--the gentle and gracious young summer,
that had come by the calendar, but had lost her way on the thermometer.
O these delaying Springs, that mock the merry-making of ancestral
England! Is the world grown so old and stricken in years, that, like
King David, it gets no heat? Why loiters, where lingers, the
beautiful, calm-breathing June? Rosebuds are bound in her trailing
hair, and the sweet of her garments always used to waft a scented gale
over the happy hills.

"Here she was wont to go! and here! and here!
Just where the daisies, pinks, and violets grow;
Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,
Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk!
But like the soft west-wind she shot along;
And where she went the flowers took thickest root,
As she had sowed them with her odorous foot."

So sang a rough-handed, silver-voiced, sturdy old fellow, harping
unconsciously the notes of my lament, and the tones of his sorrow wail
through the green boughs today, though he has been lying now these two
hundred years in England's Sleeping Palace, among silent kings and
queens. Fair and fresh and always young is my lost maiden, and
"beautiful exceedingly." Her habit was to wreathe her garland with the
May, and everywhere she found most hearty welcome; but May has come and
gone, and June is still missing. I look longingly afar, but there is
no flutter of her gossamer robes over the distant hills. No white
cloud floats down the blue heavens, a chariot of state, bringing her