The Jewel of Seven Stars

It all seemed so real that I could hardly imagine that it had ever occurred before; and yet eachepisode came, not as a fresh step in the logic of things, but as something expected.

It is in such awise that memory plays its pranks for good or ill; for pleasure or pain; for weal or woe.

It is thusthat life is bittersweet, and that which has been done becomes eternal.Again, the light skiff, ceasing to shoot through the lazy water as when the oars flashed anddripped, glided out of the fierce July sunlight into the cool shade of the great drooping willowbranches-I standing up in the swaying boat, she sitting still and with deft fingers guardingherself from stray twigs or the freedom of the resilience of moving boughs.

Again, the waterlooked golden-brown under the canopy of translucent green; and the grassy bank was of emeraldhue.

Again, we sat in the cool shade, with the myriad noises of nature both without and withinour bower merging into that drowsy hum in whose sufficing environment the great world with itsdisturbing trouble, and its more disturbing joys, can be effectually forgotten.

Again, in thatblissful solitude the young girl lost the convention of her prim, narrow upbringing, and told mein a natural, dreamy way of the loneliness of her new life.

With an undertone of sadness shemade me feel how in that spacious home each one of the household was isolated by the personalmagnificence of her father and herself; that there confidence had no altar, and sympathy noshrine; and that there even her father's face was as distant as the old country life seemed now.Once more, the wisdom of my manhood and the experience of my years laid themselves at thegirl's feet.

It was seemingly their own doing; for the individual "I" had no say in the matter, butonly just obeyed imperative orders. And once again the flying seconds multiplied themselvesendlessly.

For it is in the arcana of dreams that existences merge and renew themselves, changeand yet keep the same-like the soul of a musician in a fugue. And so memory swooned, againand again, in sleep.