“But would it not be strange,” said my friend Annabel Lee, eating daintily of lettuce and fish, “after I had had this way of living in a country of always-summer for six months or seven months--oh, I should grow vastly weary of it! And not only should I grow weary of the garden or the geese or the baskets, and the deal table under the yew-tree, but I should grow weary of everything the fair green world could anyway offer. In the so many hours that I should contemplate I should arrive at this: there can be nothing better in the way of living than caring for a garden or a flock of geese, and going up a hill to a yew-tree to eat three times every day--_nothing_, if I do my work faithfully. So then when the gray dawn should break some morning and I should awaken and find an aching at my heart, I should know that the best had failed me, and I should see the Vast Weariness with me. ‘Hast thou found me out, oh, mine enemy!’ would run over and over in my mind. And all that day the tending of the flocks would be a hard thing, and the apples on the deal table under the yew-tree would turn to dust in my mouth.” My friend Annabel Lee laid down her small silver fork, and placed her hands one upon another on her knee, and sat silent. Oh, she was a beautiful, brilliant person sitting there! I wondered hazily as I watched her how much of the day’s gold sunshine she made up for me, and how much would vanish were she to vanish. Presently she talked again. “Much depends,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “upon the amount of contemplation that one does in one’s way of living, and upon how one’s contemplation runs. Contemplation is a thing that does a great deal of mischief. But I daresay that when it as an art is made perfect it is a rare good thing and a neat, obedient servant, and knows exactly when to enter the mind and when to leave it. And whosoever may have it, thus brought to a state of perfection, is a most fortunate possessor and must need go bravely down the world. “Perhaps, now,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “when one is a goose-girl and goes to eat at a deal table under a green yew-tree, one should contemplate only kings in gilded palaces. One should begin at the beginning of a king’s life, it may be, and follow it step by step through heaviness and strife until one sees, in one’s vivid goose-girl fancy, the king at last tottering and white-haired and forsaken toward his lonely grave. “Or else one should contemplate the life of a laborer who must eat husks all his days, and is not worthy of his hire, and goes from bad to worse and becomes a beggar. “Or else one should contemplate the being of a sweet maid whose life is a fair, round, rose garden, and the thorns safely hidden and the stems pruned, and all. And one should likewise follow her step by step to her grave, or, if one so fancies, to the culmination of all happiness and success.