What further was said between them has never been gathered from the sweet wind that bore their fragmentary murmurings away among the old trees and down the silvery windings of the river. I presume that, no matter how much the circumstances of courtship may differ, true love, in the hey-day of youth, or in the vigorous prime of life, has certain constant quantities by which it may readily be known; and one of these is so sweet that, to one not personally interested, it narrowly misses being entirely too sweet for deliberate discussion. John Ruskin has, I believe, more than suggested an amendment to the ordinary methods of love-making, but lovers seem inclined to follow the old, familiar rose-scented plan, no matter how silly it may appear to superannuated philosophers and art critics. CHAPTER XIII. AT THE RUIN. Reynolds had been shut away from society for so long a time that he had returned, in a degree, to the susceptibility and receptivity of extreme youth. We grow like what we contemplate, is a very trite truth, and he had absorbed much of the outright simplicity of the mountaineers, without losing any of the character he had long ago formed. Self-knowledge may be very valuable, but self-study does not tend always toward happiness. One might almost venture to say that, in a vast majority of cases, serious self-analysis amounts to remorse if nothing worse. Moreover, one usually chooses solitude in which to erect one's furnace and laboratory of self-criticism, where one may make the heat as high and protracted as one pleases. The result is usually a mass of unsightly slag instead of the fine and precious metal one has hoped to turn out. Hence it is that a hermit returning to the world after years of seclusion and self-delusion finds it a paradise when he had expected to see it a hell. Men and women are so much purer and stronger and nobler than he had pictured them, and all the ways of human social life are so much sweeter and fresher than his diseased brain had remembered them to be, that he sloughs his crust, like a serpent, and comes out a new man.