It is indeed a strange thing to think of what slight materials happiness is made up. The nest that incloses our greatest pleasure is a thing of straws and feathers, gathered at random or carried towards us by the winds of fortune. If you were to ask me now what I deemed the most delightful period of my whole life, I don’t hesitate to say I should name this. In the first place, I possessed the great requisite of happiness--every moment of my whole day was occupied; each hour was chained to its fellow by some slight but invisible link; and whether I was hammering away at my Polish grammar, or sitting beside the pianoforte while the countess sang some of her country’s ballads, or listening to legends of Poland in its times of greatness, or galloping along at her side through the forest of Soignies, my mind was ever full; no sense of weariness or ennui ever invaded me, while a consciousness of a change in myself--I knew not what it was--suggested a feeling of pleasure and delight I cannot account for or convey. And this, I take it--though speaking in ignorance and merely from surmise--this, I suspect, is something like what people in love experience, and what gives them the ecstasy of the passion. There is sufficient concentration in the admiration of the loved object to give the mind a decided and firm purpose, and enough of change in the various devices to win her praise to impart the charm of novelty. Now, for all this, my reader, fair or false as she or he may be, must not suspect that anything bordering on love was concerned in the present case. To begin--the countess was married, and I was brought up at an excellent school at Bangor, where the catechism, Welsh and English, was flogged into me until every commandment had a separate welt of its own on my back. No; I had taken the royal road to happiness. I was delighted without stopping to know why, and enjoyed myself without ever thinking to inquire wherefore. New sources of information and knowledge were opened to me by those who possessed vast stores of acquirement; and I learned how the conversation of gifted and accomplished persons may be made a great agent in training and forming the mind, if not to the higher walks of knowledge, at least to those paths in which the greater part of life is spent, and where it imports each to make the road agreeable to his fellows. I have said to you I was not in love--how could I be, under the circumstances?--but still I own that the regular verbs of the Polish grammar had been but dry work, if it had not been for certain irregular glances at my pretty mistress; nor could I ever have seen my way through the difficulties of the declensions if the light of her eyes had not lit up the page, and her taper finger pointed out the place.