I now saw that the girl was in love with me, and that she did not know it herself. I take it that the sensations of a man who suddenly discovers that the pretty girl he has been admiring is captivated by his attentions, are very like what a head clerk may feel at being sent for by the house, and informed that he is now one of the firm! This may seem a commercial formula to employ, but it will serve to show my meaning; and as I lay there on that velvet turf, what a delicious vision spread itself around me! At one moment we were rich, travelling in splendor through Europe, amassing art-treasures wherever we went and despoiling all the great galleries of their richest gems. I was the associate of all that was distinguished in literature and science, and my wife the chosen friend of queens and princesses. How unaffected we were, how unspoiled by fortune! Approachable by all, our graceful benevolence seemed to elevate its object and make of the recipient the benefactor. What a world of bliss this vile dross men call gold can scatter! “There--there, good people,” said I, blandly, waving my hand, “no illuminations, no bonfires; your happy faces are the brightest of all welcomes.” Then we were suddenly poor,--out of caprice, just to see how we should like it,--and living in a little cottage under Snowden, and I was writing, Heaven knows what, for the periodicals, and my wife rocking a little urchin in a cradle, whom we constantly awoke by kissing, each pretending that it was all the other's fault, till we ratified a peace in the same fashion. Then I remembered the night, never to be forgotten, when I received my appointment as something in the antipodes, and we went up to town to thank the great man who bestowed it, and he asked us to dinner, and he was, I fancied, more than polite to my wife, and I sulked about it when we got home, and she petted and caressed me, and we were better friends than ever, and I swore I would not accept the Minister's bounty, and we set off back again to our cottage in Wales, and there we were when I came to myself once more. It is always pleasant--at least, I have ever felt it so, on awaking from a dream or a revery--to know that one has borne himself well in some imaginary crisis of difficulty and peril. I like to think that I was in no hurry to get into the longboat. I am glad I gave poor Dick that last fifty-pound note,--my last in the world,--and I rejoice to remember that I did not run away from that grizzly bear, but sent the four-pound ball right into the very middle of his forehead. You feel in all these that the metal of your nature has been tested, and come out pure gold; at all events, _I_ did, and was very happy thereat. It was not till after some little time that I could get myself clear out of dreamland, and back to the actual world of small debts and difficulties, and then I bethought me of the newspaper which lay unread beside me.