My serenity gradually returned, and I convinced myself anew that he was really a woman.--I recovered sufficient self-possession to carry out my rôle properly. Do you know the play? perhaps not. As I have done nothing but read and declaim it for a fortnight I know it by heart from beginning to end, and I cannot realize that everybody is not as familiar as myself with the plot and the intrigue; it is an error into which I am very apt to fall, to think that, when I am drunk, everybody else is drunk and trying to knock down the walls, and if I knew Hebrew, I certainly should ask my valet for my dressing-gown and slippers in that tongue, and should be very much surprised if he did not understand me.--You can read it if you choose; I assume that you have read it and touch only on those passages that have some connection with my position. Rosalind, walking in the forest with her cousin, is greatly surprised to find that the bushes bear, instead of blackberries and wild plums, madrigals in her praise; strange fruits which luckily are not accustomed to grow on bramble bushes; for when one is thirsty it is more satisfactory to find good berries on the branches than bad sonnets. She is much disturbed to know who has spoiled the bark of the young trees by carving her initials on them.--Celia, who has already met Orlando, tells her, after long urging, that the rhymer is no other than the young man who vanquished Charles the wrestler, the duke's athlete. Soon Orlando himself appears and Rosalind enters into conversation with him by asking him the time.--Surely an extremely simple beginning; one can imagine nothing more commonplace.--But have no fear; from that trite, commonplace phrase you will see an unlooked-for crop spring up of witty conceits, overflowing with curious flowers and comparisons, as if from the richest and most thoroughly fertilized soil. After a few lines of sparkling dialogue in which each word, as it falls upon the phrase, sends out to right and left millions of dancing sparks, like a hammer falling upon a red hot bar of iron, Rosalind asks Orlando if by chance he knows the man who hangs odes on hawthorn bushes and elegies on brambles, and who seems to be afflicted with the quotidian of love, which she knows how to cure. Orlando confesses that he is the man who is tortured by love, and as she has boasted of having several infallible remedies for that disease, begs her to do him the favor of telling him one.--"You in love?" replies Rosalind, "you have none of the marks whereby a lover is recognized; you have neither a lean cheek nor a sunken eye, your hose is not ungartered nor your sleeve unbuttoned, and your shoe is tied with much grace; if you are in love with any one, it is certainly with yourself, and you have need of none of my remedies." It was not without genuine emotion that I replied in these exact words: "Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love thee."[2]