Now it was life full beyond our fondest expectations, if not our fancies of its possibilities, which lured us forward. We were making the most of our mutual interest in the books we were reading, and she was giving, as sisters give so far beyond the giving of brothers, her sympathy to me in what I was trying to write. It was some time since I had turned, upon the counsel of J. W., from Greek to German, I forget from just what reasoning, though I think it was because he said I could study Greek any time, and now we could study German together. I had gone so far with it that I was already reading Heine and trying to write like him, instead of reading my Spanish poets and trying to imitate them in their own meters. But there is scarcely any definite memory of my sister's literary companionship left me. I remember her coming to me once with the praise, which I shame-facedly refused, of the neighbor who had pointed to a row of Washington Irving's works in her house, and said that some day my books would fill a shelf like that. For the rest, I am dimly aware of our walking summer evenings down a certain westward way from our house, and of her helping me dream a literary future. If she had then a like ambition she kept it from me, and it was not till twenty years later that she sent me a play she had written, with village motives and village realities, treated with a frankness which I still had not the intelligence to value. The play never came to the stage, and in that farther time, it was the fruition of hopes which had not defined themselves, that when my father's scheme was realized, not only I, but she too, was to return to Columbus with him. It would be easy to pretend, and I can easily believe that we had always, at the bottom of our hearts, thought of Columbus with distinct longing; but I am not sure that there was more in our remembrance of it than a sense of its greatness as the state capital to give direction to our ambition for some experience of the world beyond our village. There was no part for her in our journalistic plan; probably the affair for her was an outing which she had won by her unselfish devotion to the duties of her narrow lot; but what I am sure of, and what I am glad of now, amidst my compunctions for not valuing her loving loyalty at its true worth, is that she did have this outing. III