_September_ 9.--As I sit basking in the sunshine on this familiar little rocky peninsula in the centre of the bay, still almost surrounded by the falling tide, I note a youth and a girl crossing the sands below me, where the gulls calmly rest, to the edge of dry beach. Then she sits down and he stands or bends tenderly over her. This continues for some time, but the operation thus deliberately carried out, it ultimately becomes clear, is simply that of removing her shoes and stockings. At last it is accomplished, he raises her, swiftly harmonises his costume to hers, and forthwith conducts her through some shallow water to an island of sand. The deeper passage to my peninsula still remains to be forded, and the feat requires some circumspection. In less than half an hour it will be easy to walk across dry-shod, and time is evidently no object. But so prosaic a proceeding is disdained by Paul and Virginia. He wades carefully forward within reach of the rocks, flings boots, white stockings, and other cumbersome belongings on to the lowest ledge of rock, returns to the island, and lifts her up, supporting her body with one arm as she clasps his neck, while with the other he slowly and anxiously feels his way with his stout stick among the big seaweed-grown stones in the surf. I see them clearly now, a serious bespectacled youth of some twenty--one years and a golden--haired girl, some two or three years younger, in a clinging white dress. The young St. Christopher at last deposits his sacred burden at the foot of the peninsula, which they climb, to sit down on the rocks, and in the same deliberate, happy, self-absorbed spirit complete their toilet and depart.
I know not what relation of tender intimacy unites them, but when they have gone their faces remain in my memory. I seem to see them thirty years hence, that honest, faithful, straightforward face of the youth, transformed into the rigid image of an eminently-worthy and wholly-undistinguished citizen, and the radiant, meaningless girl a stout and careful Mrs. Grundy with a band of children around her. Yet the memory of to-day will still perhaps be enshrined in their hearts.
_September_ 12.--"I study you as I study the Bible," said a wise and religious old doctor to a patient who had proved a complex and difficult case. His study was of much benefit to her and probably to himself.
