It was twilight when I left, and I made my usual detour around our hamlet. Outside the village and just beyond the school-house, in a little cottage whose diamond windows are almost hidden under green creepers, lived Alice Moylan, the head monitress in our little school. I rather liked Alice, for when she was a little child of seven years, she gave me an idea of something for which I had been long seeking. It was a few years back, when I had not laid up my pen finally, but still retained the belief, with a certain author, that "there is no greater mental excitement, and scarcely a sweeter one, than when a young man strides up and down his room, and boldly resolves to take a quire of writing paper and turn it into a manuscript." And in these latter days of life I still sought for a vision of our Lady, which I could keep before my imagination when writing certain things in her honor. Now (perhaps I have already said it), I had a peculiar devotion to the Child-Virgin of the Temple and of the House of Nazareth, where in the noontide the Archangel entered and spoke his solemn words. And I never said the _Magnificat_ but on my knees and with a full heart, as I thought on the Child-Prophetess of Hebron and the wondering aged saints. But I sought her face everywhere in vain--in pictures, in the faces of my little children; but not one came up to my ideal of what the little maiden of the Temple and Nazareth was like. At last, one day, little Alice came, and in her sweet oval face, and calm, entreating eyes and raven hair, subdued beneath such a dainty frilled headdress, I saw our Blessed Lady and wondered and was glad. And in those days of her simple childhood, before the awful dawn of self-consciousness, I used dream and dream, and put into form my dreams; and the face that haunted all my sacred and poetic conceptions of our dear Queen was the face of little Alice. But the child grew, and waxed in strength, but waned in beauty,--at least the beauty I regarded when the white soul looked out of the beautiful childish face. But Alice grew to be the village beauty, and she knew it. Every one told her of it; but her chief admirer was the little milliner, who lived down near the post-office, and whose simple life was a mixture of very plain, prosaic poverty, and very high and lofty romance. From this Miss Levis, who was a confirmed novel-reader, Alice learned that "she had the face and form of an angel"; that "her eyes had a velvety softness that drew you like an enchanted lake"; that these same eyes were "starry in their lustrous beauty"; that she had "the complexion of a creole, or rather the healthy pallor of the high-born aristocracy of England"; that "her figure was willowy and swayed like a reed in the wind"; and all the other curious jargon of the novelette--the deadly enemy of simplicity and innocence. Then Alice grew proud and vain, and her vanity culminated on the night of our concert in