"How bright! how beautiful!" says he, backing off suddenly from the maple question, which had covered a world of hidden meaning, and looking out to sea, with a delicate wish, no doubt, to spare my blushes. "Some persons have been kind enough to think so," says I, "but it isn't for me to say." "I love the fitful changes--the soft transparency: nothing can be more lovely," says he. The occasion required downcast eyes and shrinking silence. I gave him both. There could be no better answer for a speech so personal and yet so poetic. "I hope you share my feelings in this." That moment--that precious, precious moment--was broken in upon in a way that makes me clench my teeth as I write. Up the sands, racing forward like a young colt, came "that child," with her flat flying back by the strings, and a broken parasol in her hand; up she flew toward Mr. Burke. "Come here," says she, "I want you to whip that boy out there within an inch of his life. I broke my parasol over his head, but it wasn't half enough; I want you to give it to him good." "But what has he done," says Mr. Burke, no doubt riled to the depths of his noble heart, as I was. "Done enough, I should think. He mimicked the way I carried my parasol, and said some folks wanted to be young ladies before they could read--that's what he has done," says the creature, flaming out like a bantam. "Perhaps we had better go in," says Mr. Burke, lifting himself out of the sand. "Not till you've given him hail Columbia," says the creature, taking a new grip on her broken parasol. "I rather think he has got that," says Mr. Burke, reaching out his hand to help me up. I arose. I jerked that Leghorn flat by the strings, and tied it under the creature's chin with a pull that made her scream. Then I took Mr. Burke's arm and mounted the wooden steps, with a feeling at my heart that is not to be described by mortal pen. What a world of bliss that wicked little wretch broke in upon. His soul was verging towards mine so beautifully. The final words were burning on his lips when she rushed in. Still, memory is left, reason is left. I know what was in that noble heart, and that knowledge is bliss. I felt this: I knew his meaning. To a common woman he might have said, "I love you dearly. I wish above all things to spend my life with you;" but to a creature made up of sensitive pride and poetic niceties, unclothed proposals of this kind must be quite out of place. Of course I understood all that, and felt the refinement of his conduct deeply. What more _could_ a man say than this? In order to be delicately personal, one must talk by comparisons. To praise the State one is born in, is to praise one's self. To seize upon any material thing for a poetical comparison with a human being, is to be intensely complimentary to that being.