Marvellous, marvellous time! so short in its duration, but leaving such an indelible impress on the memory! A charming period, a _hasheesh_-dream impossible ever to be renewed, a prolonged intoxication scarcely capable of realisation in one's sober moments. A thing of once, which gone never comes again, but leaves behind it remembrances which, while they cause the lips to curl at their past folly, yet give the heart a twinge in the reflection that the earnestness which outbalanced the folly, the power of entering into and being swayed by them, the youth--that is it, after all; confess it!--the youth is vanished for ever and aye. What and where was the glamour, the power of which you dimly remember but cannot recall? Put aside the claret-jug, and, with your feet on the fender, as you sit alone, try and analyse that bygone time. The form comes clearly out of the mist: the dark-brown banded hair, the quiet earnest eyes the slight lissome figure and delicate hands; and with them a floating reminiscence of a violet perfume, a subtle, delicate essence, which made your heart beat with extra vigour even before your eyes rested on what they longed for. Kisses and hand-clasps and ardent glances were the current coin of those days; one of either of the former missed, say at parting for the night, for instance, made you wretched; one of the latter shot in a different direction sent you to toss sleepless all night on your bed, and to rise with the face of a murderer, and with something not very different from the mind of one. There were heartaches in those days, real, dead, dull pains, sickening longings, spasms of hope and fear; dim dread of missing the prize on the attainment of which the whole of life was set, a psychical state which would be as impossible to your mind now as would the early infantile freshness to your lined cheek, or the curling locks of boyhood to your grizzled pate. It is gone, clean gone. Perhaps it snapped off short with a wrench, leaving its victim with a gaping wound which the searing-iron of time has completely cicatrised; perhaps it mellowed down into calm, peaceful, conjugal, and subsequently paternal affection. But tell me not, O hard-hearted and worldly-minded bachelor, intent on the sublimation of self, and cynically enough disposed to all that is innocent and tender,--tell me not, O husband, however devoted to your wife, however proud of your offspring,--tell me not that a regret for that vanished time does not sometimes cross your mind, that the sense of having lost the power of enjoying such twopenny happiness, ay, and such petty misery, does not cost you an occasional pang. It still goes on, that tragi-comedy, the same as ever, though the actors be different, though our places are now in the cushioned gallery among the spectators instead of on the stage, and we witness the performance, not with envy, not with admiration, but with a strange feeling of bewilderment that such things once were with