I wonder if the reader would care to hear about my First Love, of whom I am naturally thinking a good deal this morning, under the demoralising influences of the fresh air, blue sky, and various birds and flowers. More potent intoxicants these than any that need licenses for their purveyance, responsible—see the poets—for no end of human foolishness.
I was about to tell the story of my First Love, but on second thoughts I decide not. It will keep, and I feel hungry, and yonder seems a dingle where I can lie and open my knapsack, eat, drink, and doze among the sun-flecked shadows.
CHAPTER IV
IN WHICH I EAT AND DREAM
The girl we go to meet is the girl we have met before. I evolved this sage reflection, as, lost deep down in the green alleys of the dingle, having fortified the romantic side of my nature with sandwiches and sherry, I lazily put the question to myself as to what manner of girl I expected the Golden Girl to be. A man who goes seeking should have some notion of what he goes out to seek. Had I any ideal by which to test and measure the damsels of the world who were to pass before my critical choosing eye? Had I ever met any girl in the past who would serve approximately as a model,—any girl, in fact, I would very much like to meet again? I was very sleepy, and while trying to make up my mind I fell asleep; and lo! the sandwiches and sherry brought me a dream that I could not but consider of good omen. And this was the dream.
I thought my quest had brought me into a strange old haunted forest, and that I had thrown myself down to rest at the gnarled mossy root of a great oak-tree, while all about me was nought but fantastic shapes and capricious groups of gold-green bole and bough, wondrous alleys ending in mysterious coverts, and green lanes of exquisite turf that seemed to have been laid down in expectation of some milk-white queen or goddess passing that way.
And so still the forest was you could have heard an acorn drop or a bird call from one end of it to the other. The exquisite silence was evidently waiting for the exquisite voice, that presently not so much broke as mingled with it, like a swan swimming through a lake.
"Whom seek you?" said, or rather sung, a planetary voice right at my shoulder. But three short unmusical Saxon words, yet it was as though a mystical strain of music had passed through the wood.
"Whom seek you?" and again the lovely speech flowered upon the silence, as white water-lilies on the surface of some shaded pool.