“At the station I met my bosom-friend Julia Mason. ‘How fortunate!’ she exclaimed. ‘Here is my cousin, bound for the Summer School, too. You must philosophize together.’ She introduced us to each other, and then hastened to take her own train, while the young man and I made our way together to the express train for Concord. “He pleased my fancy at once. I was just at the age when a girl always sees a possible lover in every handsome young man whom she chances to know. Not that the thought occurred to me then, for he was far from being the ideal lover whom I had dreamed of marrying. My lover must combine all the graces of an Alcibiades with the virtues of a Bayard, a knight _sans peur et sans reproche_, with classic features, curling locks, and a voice and smile that should melt the very stones.” “You matter-of-fact old Mildred,” I laughed. “To think of your ever being so romantic!” She smiled a little as she unclasped her hands from her knee and leaned back. “Yes,” she said, “I had my dreams once.” Then she continued: “He was older than I, twenty-five, perhaps; tall, broad-shouldered, a manly man every inch of him; a little clumsy and awkward at first, and lacking in all the manifold little attentions which girls like. He did not offer to carry my bag, I observed, and he entered the car-door first. He was certainly not in the least like the courteous, gallant knight of my girlish fancy. “But presently, as he began to talk in an animated way, his frank blue eyes lighted up and lent to his by no means classic features a wonderful charm. We got well acquainted on the short journey. He, it seems, had, like myself, been at Concord only once before. It was on that raw, cold day in ’75, when I, a young school-girl, with my mother, and he a Phillips Academy boy, had, unknown to each other, essayed to board the train in that same frightfully thronged station, and go to the Centennial celebration. “I told him of my droll experience, wedged in between a dozen men and women in the smoking-car. He, it seems, was not so fortunate as I, for he took no lunch, and, like thousands of others who could buy nothing for either love or money, almost starved. I told him about our experience: how we marched with the women assembled at the town hall, led by a lady with a little flag, around the road to the tent on Battle lawn; how there we were nearly annihilated by the throng, and how at last by some good fortune I was borne up to the platform’s very edge, and stood there within a few feet of Grant and all his cabinet, and with Curtis, Emerson, and Lowell all within arm’s reach.