Your flitting recollection brings back with gushes of exultation the figure of that little, blue-eyed hoiden,--Madge,--as she came with her work to pass the long evenings with Nelly; it calls again the shy glances that you cast upon her, and your _naïve_ ignorance of all the little counter-play that might well have passed between Frank and Nelly. Your mother's form too, clear and distinct, comes upon the wave of your rocking thought; her smile touches you now in age as it never touched you in boyhood.
The image of that fair Miss Dalton, who led your fancy into such mad captivity, glides across your vision like the fragment of a crazy dream long gone by. The country home, where lived the grandfather of Frank, gleams kindly in the sunlight of your memory; and still,--poor, blind Fanny--long since gathered to that rest where her closed eyes will open upon visions of joy--draws forth a sigh of pity.
Then comes up that sweetest and brightest vision of love, and the doubt and care which ran before it,--when your hope groped eagerly through your pride and worldliness toward the sainted purity of her whom you know to be--all too good,--when you trembled at the thought of your own vices and blackness in the presence of her who seemed virtue's self. And even now your old heart bounds with joy as you recall the first timid assurance that you were blessed in the possession of her love, and that you might live in her smiles.
Your thought runs like floating melody over the calm joy that followed you through so many years,--to the prattling children, who were there to bless your path. How poor seem now your transports, as you met their childish embraces, and mingled in their childish employ; how utterly weak the actual, when compared with that glow of affection which memory lends to the scene!
Yet all this is gone; and the anxieties are gone, which knit your heart so strongly to those children, and to her--the mother,--anxieties which distressed you,--which you would eagerly have shunned, yet whose memory you would not now bargain away for a king's ransom! What were the sunlight worth, if clouds did not sometimes hide its brightness; what were the spring, or the summer, if the lessons of the chilling winter did not teach us the story of their warmth?