And waving his plumed hat, he vaulted over the stile; and I felt he was right. Looking back at the turn leading to the house, I saw he was watching me from the field. But as I turned the corner and came in sight of the gables of the Manor, a foreboding came on me, as of siftings and severings to come--of a few pebbles, or a few rushes, gently giving the slightest turn to the course of the two little trickling springs, and their waters flowing, ever after, by different banks, and falling at last into the oceans which wash the shores of opposite worlds. But not Lettice, never Lettice; the whole world, I thought, should be no barrier to sever us from Lettice! Nor should all the political or ecclesiastical differences in the world ever check or chill the current of our love and reverence to all the true, and brave, and just, and good, and godly. For politics, even ecclesiastical politics, are of time; but truth, and courage, and justice, and goodness, and godliness, are of God, and are eternal. CHAPTER VI. The six mouths of the year 1641, from early May till November, shine back on me beyond the stormy years which part them from us, like a meadow bright with dew and sunshine on the edge of a dark and heaving sea. Beyond those months, in the further distance, stretches the dim Eden of childhood, with its legends and its mysteries, and its gates of Paradise scarcely closed. Bordering them, on the further side, glooms the broad shadow of Roger's temptation and bitter repentance. On the hither side heaves the great intervening sea of civil war. But through all, that little sunny space beams out, peaceful, as if no stormy waves beat against it; distinct, as if no long space of life parted it from us. Did I say childhood was the Eden? Then youth is the "garden planted eastward in Eden," the Paradise which "the Lord God plants" in the outset of the dullest or stormiest life, where the river which compasseth the land flows over golden sands, "and the gold of that land is good." Not childhood, surely, but early youth, "the youth of youth," is the golden age of life. Childhood is the twilight. Youth is the beautiful dawn. Childhood is the dream and the struggling out of it; youth is the conscious, joyful waking. If childhood has its fairy robes spun out of every gossamer, its fairy treasures in every leaf; it has also its eerie terrors woven of the twilight shadows, its overwhelming torrents of sorrow having their fountains in an April shower, as it steps uncertainly through the unknown world. And neither its joys, nor its sorrows, nor its terrors, nor its treasures, can it utter.