This pleasant stream was almost a human thing to the poet. In the days before he found his Eleanor seated on its bank he addressed to it his last musings on the vanished Belinda: "Where the pheasant roosts at night, Lonely, drowsy, out of sight, Where the evening breezes sigh, Solitary, there stray I. "Close along the shaded stream, Source of many a youthful dream, Where branchy cedars dim the day, There I muse and there I stray." Later, with "the fairest of women" by his side, when Belinda had grown to be only a memory, he composed his exquisite poem, "Retirement:" "A hermit's house beside a stream, With forests planted round, Whatever it to you may seem, More real happiness I deem Than if I were a monarch crown'd. "A cottage I could call my own, Remote from domes of care; A little garden, wall'd with stone, The wall with ivy overgrown, A limpid fountain near, "Would more substantial joys afford, More real bliss impart, Than all the wealth that misers hoard, Than vanquished worlds, or world's restored-- Mere cankers of the heart! "Vain, foolish man! how vast thy pride, How little can thy wants supply!-- 'Tis surely wrong to grasp so wide-- We act as if we only had To triumph--not to die!" Reading its faded original, we hear the strong, mellifluous voice of the poet that the ladies of Charleston used to grow enthusiastic over when he visited his brother Peter in that city, and our minds grow retrospective, leading us back through the years to the couple by the little silver thread of water which long ago gave up its life to some mysterious unknown ocean. What a joyous thing it is when she is near him to listen to his words and share in his flights of fancy! The wind whispers through the pine-trees, and their soft sighing mingles with the gurgling cadences of the wavelets and breaks up the sunlit silence. The wind is a dream wind, and brings to them both sweet visions of the future. The house, surrounded by walls "with ivy overgrown" and "remote from domes of care," where he longs to take her, is almost a reality. Fate is a hag old and blind, and Life is a song from a charmed lute. Soon after his meeting with Nelly Forman, Freneau wrote his tragedy of "Major André," which was never presented before the footlights. It is not known whether he ever gave it to a printer, and only fragments of his manuscript are in existence to-day. A portion of it shows us the unfortunate André pleading for his life before a tribunal, and as we finger the time-stained paper, desecrated by the household accounts of later years, a tearful Eleanor rises up before us, listening to the impassioned reading of her poetic lover. For his "Major André" Freneau wrote a prologue, which he afterwards changed and permitted to be spoken at the opening of the Philadelphia Theatre. This he dedicated "to his Excellency General Washington." "PROLOGUE