"That boy is dead as Schariar,
Tiglath-pileser, or Clotaire,
Who once of love got many a scar.
And his loved lasses past compare?--
None is alive now anywhere.
Each is transmuted nowadays
Into a stranger, and displays
No whit of love's investitures.
I let these women go their ways,
Yet love for each loved lass endures.

"Heart o' My Heart, thine be the praise
If aught of good in me betrays
Thy tutelage--whose love matures
Unmarred in these more wistful days,--
Yet love for each loved lass endures."

For this was the year that I graduated, and Chloris--I violate no
confidence in stating that her actual name was Aurelia Minns, and that
she had been, for a greater number of years than it would be courteous
to remember, the undisputed belle of Fairhaven,--had that very
afternoon married a promising young doctor; and I was draining the cup
of my misery to the last delicious drop, and was of course inspired
thereby to the perpetration of such melancholy bathos as only a
care-free youth of twenty is capable of evolving.


5

"Dear boy," said Bettie, when I had made an end of reading, "and are