No, my dear Silvio, I have not forgotten you; I am not one of those who go through life without a backward glance; my past follows me and encroaches upon my present, and almost upon my future; your friendship is one of the sunlit spots that stand out most clearly on the blue horizon of my later years; often, from the peak on which I stand, I turn to gaze upon it with a feeling of ineffable melancholy. Oh! what lovely weather it was!--how angelically pure we were!--Our feet hardly touched the ground, we had wings on our shoulders, as it were, our desires carried us away and the fair halo of youth around our foreheads trembled in the breeze of spring. Do you remember the little island covered with poplars at the spot where the river forms a little arm?--To reach it we had to cross a long, very narrow plank that bent in the middle, with a strange sensation; an excellent bridge for goats and little used, in fact, except by them: it was a delightful spot.--Short, thick grass where the forget-me-not opened its pretty little blue twinkling eye, a path, as yellow as nankeen, that served as a belt for the green robe of the islet and encircled its waist, the constantly moving shadow of aspens and poplars, were not the least charms of that paradise;--there were great pieces of linen that the women stretched out to whiten in the dew;--one would have said they were square patches of snow.--And the little dark, sun-burned girl whose great wild eyes sparkled so brightly under her long locks, and who ran after the goats, threatening them with her osier switch when they were on the point of walking on the linen she was watching--do you remember her?--And the sulphur-colored butterflies, with their irregular, hesitating flight, and the kingfisher we tried so many times to catch, that had its nest in the clump of alders; and the banks sloping to the river, with the steps roughly hewn in the rock, with their posts and stakes, all green at the bottom and almost always closed by a hedge of plants and branches? How smooth and clear the water was! how the golden gravel glistened at the bottom! and how pleasant it was to sit on the bank and dabble our toes in the stream! The water-lily, with its golden flowers unfolding gracefully, seemed like green hairs floating on the gleaming back of some nymph in the bath.--The sky gazed at its reflection in that mirror with azure smiles and transparent rifts of pearl-gray of most bewitching beauty, and at every hour in the day there were turquoise blues, golden yellows, fleecy whites and flickering shades in inexhaustible variety.--How I loved those flocks of ducks with the emerald necks that sailed incessantly from bank to bank and caused an occasional wrinkle on that glassy surface!