“So be it,” he said, and we passed under the yews, their sad branches flushed in the sun, out through the gate, under the old archway with its mouldering statues, up the pretty straggling road that formed the High Street of Leighstone, arm in arm together, fast friends we each of us felt, though but acquaintances of an hour. The instinct that out of a multitude selects one, though you may scarcely know his name, and tells you that one is your friend, is as strange as unerring. It was this unconscious necromancy that had woven a mesh of golden threads caught from the summer sunlight around us as we moved along. Its influence was upon us, breathing in the perfumed air. I had never had a real friend of my own age before, and I hailed this one as the discovery of a life-time. We should strike out together, tread the same path, be it rough or smooth, arm in arm until the end come. Damon and Pythias would be nothing to us. The same loves, the same hates, the same hopes, were to guide, animate, and sustain us. Castles in the air! Castles in the air! Who has not built them? Who among the sons of men in the neighborhood of twenty summers has not chosen one man out of thousands, leant upon him, cherished him, made him his idol, loved him above all? And so it goes on, until some day comes a laughing eye peeping from under a bonnet, and with one dart the bosom friendship is smitten through and through, and Damon is ready to sacrifice a hecatomb of his Pythiases on the altar of the ox-eyed goddess. TO BE CONTINUED. IN MEMORIAM. E. T. OBIIT ANNOS NATA XV. Who says she has wither’d, that little White Rose? She has been but remov’d from the valley of tears To a garden afar, where her loveliness glows Begemm’d with the grace-dew of virginal years, I knew we should lose her. The dear Sacred Heart Has a nook in earth’s desert for flowerets so rare; And keeps them awhile in safe shelter, apart From the wind and the rain, from the dust and the glare; But all to transplant them when fairest they bloom, When most we shall miss them. And this, that our love May be haunted the more by the fadeless perfume They have left us to breathe of the Eden above. Farewell, happy maiden! Our weariest hours May gather a share of thy perfect repose. And fragrantly still with the Lord of the flowers Thou wilt plead for thy lov’d ones--our little Saint Rose.[14] FEBRUARY 27, 1875.[15] THE TRAGEDY OF THE TEMPLE.