I wanted to settle in Melbourne too, to be near them all. But our little place was our own--a valuable property, yet unsaleable in these bad times--and Tom said we could not afford it. Besides, I knew he would be miserable cooped up in streets, and lost without his pigs and vegetable garden. Thus we felt ourselves stranded on the shore while our young ones put to sea--deserted in our old age--which, after all, is the common fate. Only we were not in our old age, either of us. I have not a grey hair in my head, even now, and have more than once been taken for Phyllis's elder sister. On the day that she was married, when I wore pale heliotrope relieved with white, I overheard old Captain Saunders--and a man of eighty ought to be a judge--say to Mr. Welshman, "She's a pretty girl, but her mother can beat her." And I should like to see the man of forty who is the equal of what my husband was at fifty-five--or is at his "present-day" age, which comes to little more. Tom is stout certainly, but only in a dignified and commanding fashion; he can out-do Harry in feats of strength, and his fine, bronzed face, with those keen blue eyes in it, has a power of manliness that kings might envy. For the matter of that, kings are not nearly so much of kings as he was accustomed to being on board his ships. I know the lady passengers made themselves ridiculous by the way they scrambled for his notice and a seat beside him at the saloon table. To people like Mrs. Underwood, though she was really my contemporary, I may seem very _passée_--no doubt I do--and a perfect granny to the children, who regard youth and beauty as solely the prerogatives of bread-and-butter misses in their teens; but--as Captain Saunders's remark indicated--I am not too old to charm where I want to charm. No, indeed; nor ever shall be--to one person, at all events. When Tom and I woke up on our silver wedding morning and kissed each other, did we not know what love meant as much and more than we had ever done, without needing Juke and Phyllis, and Harry and his Emily to teach us? I should think so, indeed! It seems to me that it _requires_ the fulness of many years, fatherhood and motherhood in all stages and phases, innumerable steps of painful experience climbed together, to bring us to the perfect comprehension of love--the best love--that love in the lore of which those children, who think themselves so knowing, are mere beginners, with the alphabet to learn.