There were gray hairs—only a very few, my gentle reader—visible among the beautiful brown locks, and the clustering curls Hugh Willson treasured the memory of so well, were all vanished; there was no bloom upon the pleasant face—the blue eyes were less bright—but the “features of the soul” remained unchanged, or if at all changed, only in their nearer approach to perfection. And amid her kindly charities, and the thousand love-inspired duties had Grace forgotten the letter ten years old, and its author! Very far from that; and it had been a source of happiness deeper than she cared to acknowledge even to herself, to look once again on Hugh Willson, and to hear his voice. But none save that one letter had ever reached her from him; he might have forgotten, though that to her seemed a thing impossible. The depths of feeling revealed in that letter _might_ have existed no longer, or at least might have ceased to bear _her_ reflection and image, when he had fully exposed it to the light. He might be dead! Once or twice she harbored the wild idea of answering his letter, to bid him come back—to assure him that there was at least one who would most heartily welcome him; and at such times Grace could but smile at her own folly—for the wanderer had no settled home, and there was no possibility of knowing where, even for a moment, his abiding place was; and so her natural good sense dispatched that fancy with a multitude of others to the land of shadows and dreams. There came round in the natural order of things a sacrament Sabbath. It was one of those heavenly days in the month of all months, that is, the “month of roses,” when, ——“If ever come perfect days; Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune, And over it softly her warm ear lays; Whether we look or whether we listen, We hear life murmur, and see it glisten! Every clod feels a stir of might, An instinct within that reaches and towers, And grasping above it blindly for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.” Thus describes Lowell one of those “perfect days” I am speaking of. (And, by the way, have you yet read that, the most exquisite poem produced in these latter days? If you have not, I prithee leave my romance unfinished, and inflict whatever other penance on yourself you may deem proper for neglecting so long that “gem of the first water,” whether regarded as a _luxuriously printed_ book, or as a poem beyond all praise or—criticism!)