“You,” said Annabel Lee, “with your half-conscious soul, when you sit where the gray waves wash the sea-wall at high-tide, when you sit listening with your head bent and your hands dead cold, you think you realize your life--you think you know its hardness--you think you have measured the cruelty they will give you; but you do not know. You know but half--you weep for the other half, though it be horror. “Still, though you are but half-conscious, though you weep for the other half, when you sit listening with your head bent and your hands dead cold, where the gray waves wash the sea-wall at high-tide--yet you know some of each one of the things that are around you. “Wonderful in conception is the half-conscious soul,” said Annabel Lee.---- I looked hard at my friend Annabel Lee. Was she teasing me? Was she laughing at me? For she does tease me and she does laugh at me. And was she at either of these pastimes, with all this about a half-conscious soul? But here again she left me ignorant of her thought, and there is no way of knowing. VII THE YOUNG-BOOKS OF TROWBRIDGE There are two writers, among them all, to whom I owe thanks for countless hours of complete pleasure. Not the pleasure that stirs and fires one, but the pleasure which enters into the entire personality, and rests and satisfies a common, unstrained mind. ’Tis the same pleasure that comes with eating all by myself--eating peaches and a fine, tiny lamb chop in the middle of the day. One of these two writers is J. T. Trowbridge who has written young-books. Often I have thought, Life would be different, and duller colored, and less thickly sprinkled with marigolds-and-cream, had I never known my Trowbridge. Often I have thanked the happy fate that put into my hands my first young-book of Trowbridge. ’Twas when I was fourteen--one day in October, when I lived in a flat, windy town that was named Great Falls, in Montana. Since that time I have never been without the young-books of J. T. Trowbridge. There have but seven years passed since then, but when seven years more, and seven years again, up to threescore, have gone, I still shall spend one-half my rest-hours, my pleasure-hours, my loosely-comfortable, unstrained hours with the young-books of Trowbridge. When I go to a theater I enjoy it thoroughly. A theater is a good thing, and the actor is a stunning person--but how eagerly and gladly I come back into my own room where there is a faithful, little, tan deer standing waiting, all so pathetic and sweet, upon the desk. When I go out into two crowded rooms among some fascinating persons that I have heard of before--women with fine-wrought gowns--I like that, too, and I wouldn’t have missed it--but how utterly restful and adorable it is to come back to my own room where there is my comfortable quiet friend in a rusty black flannel frock, sitting waiting--and her hands so soft and good to feel.