Oh! what sweet sunny lapses come cheering and softening the rapid course of life’s troubled stream. There are several of those green spots of memory, as the poet calls it—these oases in the midst of the desert, even within my own remembrance. But on few, if any of them can my heart rest with as much pleasure as on the months we passed in that little cottage. There were no events—there was no excitement—for me and Mariette, at least. I remember wandering with her about that sunny garden, playing with her in the cool, airy pleasure-house which stood in one corner, helping her to gather flowers to deck her mother’s table, wandering with her through the forest beneath the green shade, with the dry, brown filaments of the fir crackling under our young feet. Here and there we would come to a place where oaks and beeches mingled with the pine and a thick growth of underwood narrowed our path; but as compensation, we were there sure to find a rich treasure of wild-flowers, more beautiful in our eyes than all the garden bestowed. Very often, too, in the clear May evenings we would sit under the little shabby porch of the house—Mariette upon my knee, with her arms clasped round my neck—and as the sky grew gray, and the stars began to peer and glimmer up above, would listen to the notes of the nightingale as he prolonged his song after all the forest choir had fallen into silence; and when some of those peculiar notes were coming which we love the best to hear, and Mariette knew that the delicious cadence was nigh at hand, she would raise her beautiful liquid eyes to my face, and whisper “hark” and gaze at me still as if to share my enjoyment, and to make me share hers. Oh! how that child twined herself round my boy’s heart. Dear, dear, dear Mariette. In all that I have seen in life, and strange and varied has that life been, I have never seen any thing that I loved as much as you. The first freshness of my thoughts—the first—the tenderest—the purest of my affections, were all yours!