nowadays unto summer and winter; for like the one is hot and the other cold, so fareth love nowadays."....... He laid the book aside upon the grass, sat up, and mournfully looked about him. Effort was usually needed to withdraw his mind from those low-down shadowy centuries over into which of late by means of the book, as by means of a bridge spanning a known and an unknown land, he had crossed, and wonder-stricken had wandered; but these words brought him swiftly home to the country of his own sorrow. Unstable love! feebleness of nature! one blast of a cutting winter wind and lo! green summer defaced: the very phrases seemed shaped by living lips close to the ear of his experience. It was in this spot a few weeks ago that he had planned his future with Amy: these were the acres he would buy; on this hill-top he would build; here, home-sheltered, wife-anchored, the warfare of his flesh and spirit ended, he could begin to put forth all his strength upon the living of his life. Had any frost ever killed the bud of nature's hope more unexpectedly than this landscape now lay blackened before him? And had any summer ever cost so much? What could strike a man as a more mortal wound than to lose the woman he had loved and in losing her see her lose her loveliness? As the end of it all, he now found himself sitting on the blasted rock of his dreams in the depths of the greening woods. He was well again by this time and conscious of that retightened grasp upon health and redder stir of life with which the great Mother-nurse, if she but dearly love a man, will tend him and mend him and set him on his feet again from a bed of wounds or sickness. It had happened to him also that with this reflushing of his blood there had reached him the voice of Summer advancing northward to all things and making all things common in their awakening and their aim.