“Little Em., I do not know that I can give you a wiser lesson or do you a greater service than by telling you two little incidents in my life’s experience as examples. Will you listen?” “Yes, sir,” breathed the girl in tones so low that the words scarcely reached his ears. “When I was a young man I fell desperately in love. You smile, Em.; but fifty years ago I _was_ a young man of twenty years, and, as I said, desperately in love with a pretty, amiable but illiterate and humbly-born girl. I wished to marry her, but my father and mother were bitterly opposed to the match. The controversy ran high. It almost estranged me from my parents. At length there was a compromise. I agreed to wait a year until I should be of age before proposing to my love. And they agreed, in the event of my continuing to desire the marriage at the end of that time, to withdraw their opposition. I was soon after ordered to sea for a three years’ voyage. The end of that time found me at the antipodes—at the port of Canton—more interested in the manners and customs of the Chinese than in the image of ‘the girl I left behind me.’ Even if it had been practical for me to do so, I know that I should not then have claimed my parents’ promise of their consent to my proposal of marriage to her. I had got over my ‘puppy’ love, as they probably anticipated that I would when they enticed me into that compromise which was our salvation.” As the old man uttered these words he looked wistfully at Em. She had been rosy red under his scrutiny before, but now she was marble white; her eyes were fixed upon the floor, and her fingers were clasped tightly together on her lap. He gazed at her pityingly for a moment, then sighed and took up the thread of discourse. “I say ‘ours’ child, for when I returned from my three years’ voyage I found my fair one the happy wife of a handsome young workman and the proud mother of a bouncing boy. It was a shock to my vanity, but it was a relief to my heart. I was all right; but I felt a little anxious to know whether she was. I called to see her as an old friend. She received me with frank cordiality, and showed me her baby and made me stay to tea to see her husband. When he came home she met him and hurried him upstairs ‘to clean himself,’ as she told me. And when at length he joined us at the tea-table, she took my breath away by introducing me as ‘an old beau’ of hers, who had been ‘awful spoony’ on her at one time, adding, with more frankness than delicacy: