rushes bowing and bending, as though plucked by unseen hands. The stream was full of boys in boats, and the eager noise and stir was not congenial to Hugh's meditative mood. The bathing-place was by a weir, where the green water plunged through the sluices, filling the stream with foam and sound; all about floated the exquisite reedy smell of warm river-water, bringing with it a sense of cool and unvisited places, hidden backwaters among green fields, where the willows leaned together, and the fish hung mute in the pools. They had bathed under a tall grove of poplars, and Hugh could remember the delicious freshness of the turf under his naked feet, and the sun-warmed heat of the wooden beams of the wharf. The plunge in the cold bubbling water had swept all his thoughts away into the mere joy of life, but as he sat, after dressing, with the music of the water in his ears, the same wistful mood had settled down on his mind. What did it all mean? Whither was all this beauty, this delight tending? He thought of all the generations of boys who had bathed in this place, full of joy and life. Where were they all now? He thought of those who should come after, when he too was gone to take his place in the world. And then they had gone slowly back through the meadows, with a delicious languor of sensation; the sun was now beginning to decline, and the blue wooded hills across the stream, with the smoke going up beneath them from unseen houses, wore the same air of holding some simple and sweet secret which they would not tell, and which Hugh could not penetrate. It was sad, too, to think that the beautiful day was done, become a memory only; and that he must plunge again for the morrow and for many morrows into the tide of affairs and boisterous life. He made one effort to put his thoughts into words. Putting his arm for a moment in the arm of his companion, he said, "Let us remember to-day!" His friend, who was walking sedately along with a stalk of grass between his lips, looked at him in a peculiar manner, smiled and nodded; this little compact, so quietly made, seemed for an instant to have brought Hugh and his friend together into a charmed circle. Had his friend forgotten what he remembered? The last time he had seen him, he had found a prosperous business man, full of affairs; and he had not reminded him of the day when they went together by the stream.