sed pearls) there had been an ecstasy in his happiness and a
thrilling quality of romance. No man who has not endured solitude in
long doses knows how vivid, real, and necessary people and things of the
imagination may become. Sometimes the Poor Boy laughed at himself, but
more often he surrendered to his inventions, his people, his dams,
powerhouses, and schemes of amelioration, as you surrender to an opiate.

His valley from his own house to the sea was a thriving and virtuous
state; on terms with other governments. Ships came and went; there were
exports and imports, newspapers, news. News of inventions, of romances,
of misunderstandings righted by Solomonian judgments; of successes,
promotions; and almost every day in the foreign columns were to be found
reversals of those judgments by which his friends and the citizens of
his little state had been convicted of sins and crimes of which they had
never been guilty.

But daily and sometimes nightly through the complex evolutions of his
dreams the Poor Boy never lost grip upon his own personal love-affair.
It had become more real, and with the bursting of woods and meadows into
carpets of spring flowers more necessary to him than anything in life.
It was joy for him, and rapture--a dizzy path into unknown lands where
only the footprints of the "True Romance" marked the way. But suddenly
sometimes in the very heyday of his ecstasy the tragedy of it smote him,
you may say, between the eyes--so that villages vanished, homes,
institutions, and all the creatures of his brain, and he saw himself, as
another might have seen him, a very young man, all alone, thrust out
forever and ever.

The thought that all unknown to him the real Miss Grey might love
another, belong to another, tortured him. Tortured him, too, the
knowledge that if this was so he had no right to entertain that beloved
phantom that he had made of her in his North Woods. Or it tortured him
to remember that his love for her could come to nothing--nothing. He
must not tell her that he loved her; he must not, upon a night flooded
with moonlight and the odor of flowers, so much as touch her hand,
because he knew too well--too well--that "when you touch them they
vanish."

Old Martha and Joy will never forget a certain June night. The Poor Boy
did not come home for his dinner; supper of the most tempting nature and
variety did not tempt him. He was drunk, ethereally drunk with the
beauty of the night and with lo