When Eva and I found ourselves alone together in the heart of some primeval forest, where the foot sunk ankle-deep in a carpet of more exquisite fabric than any loom of mortal workmanship could create, where the old fallen trunks of trees were all overgrown with this exquisite mossy tapestry, and all around us was a perfect broidery and inlay of flower and leaf, while birds called to us overhead, down through the flickering shadows of the pine boughs, we felt ourselves out of the world and in paradise, and able to look back from its green depths with a dispassionate judgment on the life we had left. Then, the venture we had made in striking hands with each other to live, not for the pomps and vanities of this world, but for the true realities of the heart, seemed to us the highest reason. Nature smiled on it. Every genuine green thing, every spicy fragrant bush and tree, every warbling bird, true to the laws of its nature, seemed to say to us "Well done." "I suppose," said Eva, as we sat in one of these mountain recesses whence we could gain a view of the little silvery cascade, "I suppose that there are a great many people who look on me as a proper subject of pity. My father has failed. I have married a man with no fortune, except what he has in himself. We can't afford to spend our honeymoon at Niagara, Saratoga, and the rest of the show places; and we don't contemplate either going to parties or giving them when we go back to New York." "Poor, poor Eva Van Arsdel! how art thou fallen!" said I. "Poor Aunt Maria!" said Eva. "I honestly and truly am sorry for her. She really loves me in her way--the way most people love you, which is to want you to be happy in doing as _they_ please. Her heart was set on my making an astoundingly rich match, and having a wedding that should eclipse all former weddings, and then becoming a leader of fashionable society; and to have me fail of all this is a dreadful catastrophe. I want somehow to comfort her and make up with her, but she can't forgive me. She kissed me at last with a stern and warning air that seemed to say: 'Well, if you will go to destruction, I can't help it.'" "Perhaps when she sees how happy we are, she will get over it," said I. "No, I fear not. Aunt Maria can't conceive of anybody's being happy that has to begin life with an ingrain carpet on the floor. She would think it a positive indecorum to be happy under such circumstances--a want of a proper sense of the fitness of things. Now, I propose to be very happy under precisely those circumstances, and to try to make you so; consequently you see I shall offend her moral sense continuously, and, as I said, I do wish it weren't so, because I love Aunt Maria, and am sorry I can't please her." "I suppose," said I, "there is no making her comprehend the resources we have in each other--our love of just this bright, free, natural life?"