"PREMIERS AMOURS." _Old Loves and old dreams,--_ _"Requiescant in pace."_ _How strange now it seems,--_ _"Old" Loves and "old" dreams!_ _Yet we once wrote you reams _Maude, Alice, and Gracie!_ _Old Loves and old dreams,--_ _"Requiescant in pace."_ When I called at the "Hollies" to-day, In the room with the cedar-wood presses, Aunt Deb. was just folding away What she calls her "memorial dresses." She'd the frock that she wore at fifteen,-- Short-waisted, of course--my abhorrence; She'd "the loveliest"--something in "een" That she wears in her portrait by Lawrence; She'd the "jelick" she used--"as a Greek," (!) She'd the habit she got her bad fall in; She had e'en the blue _moire antique_ That she opened Squire Grasshopper's ball in:-- New and old they were all of them there:-- Sleek velvet and bombazine stately,-- She had hung them each over a chair To the "_paniers_" she's taken to lately (Which she showed me, I think, by mistake). And I conned o'er the forms and the fashions, Till the faded old shapes seemed to wake All the ghosts of my passed-away "passions;"-- From the days of love's youthfullest dream, When the height of my shooting idea Was to burn, like a young Polypheme, For a somewhat mature Galatea. There was Lucy, who "tiffed" with her first, And who threw me as soon as her third came; There was Norah, whose cut was the worst, For she told me to wait till my "berd" came; Pale Blanche, who subsisted on salts; Blonde Bertha, who doted on Schiller; Poor Amy, who taught me to waltz; Plain Ann, that I wooed for the "siller;"-- All danced round my head in a ring, Like "The Zephyrs" that somebody painted, All shapes of the feminine thing-- Shy, scornful, seductive, and sainted,-- To my Wife, in the days she was young.... "How, Sir," says that lady, disgusted, "Do you dare to include ME among Your loves that have faded and rusted?" "Not at all!"--I benignly retort. (I was just the least bit in a temper!) "Those, alas! were the fugitive sort, But you are my--_eadem semper_!" Full stop,--and a Sermon. Yet think,-- There was surely good ground for a quarrel,-- She had checked me when just on the brink Of--I feel--a remarkable MORAL. THE SCREEN IN THE LUMBER ROOM. Yes, here it is, behind the box, That puzzle wrought so neatly-- That paradise of paradox-- We once knew so completely; You see it? 'Tis the same, I swear, Which stood, that chill September, Beside your aunt Lavinia's chair The year when ... You remember?