Times have changed. The children of the Indian girl, educated, gentle as their mother and energetic as their father, are in a handsome house. Love in the home has kept as bright as the gold in the mountain.
FOUR LETTERS.
DEAR ERNEST: I am sitting under a great oak this summer afternoon, just as the sun is setting. The western sky is crossed with bands of brilliant red and yellow, while overhead, and to the east, pink fleecy clouds are floating like phantom ships of coral. The green forest of beech and oak at my right mellows in the deepening gray of the twilight, and the white mansion at my left, with its red roof, looks like some castle in a story. The grand blue lake in the distance seems closer to me in the subdued light, and I almost question if this be a picture or reality.
How I wish you were here to sit beside me, and talk as we used to do in college days! Then we wondered where each would be, what experiences would fill each heart, and what the future had for us in its shadowy keeping.
You have been a wanderer, and seen much of the world. I have had, for the most part, a quiet life of study, have finished a book, have had anxieties, as who has not, but, best of all, I have found my ideal.
You will perhaps smile at this, and recall to me my love of athletic sports, my disregard of the affections, my entire ability to live without the gentler sex. Not that you and I both did not admire a brilliant eye, or a rosy lip, or a perfect hand, but life was so full without all this that we looked at women as one does at rare pictures—expensive luxuries, to be admired rather than possessed.
But all has changed with me. I have met one who will, I think, fill my vision for life. She is not strictly beautiful. Her blue eyes are calm and clear. Her manner is not responsive, and she would seem to a stranger like one to be worshipped from afar. She has depth of affection, but it is not on the surface.
Edith Graham is to most persons a mystery. She loves nature, sits with me often to enjoy these wonderful sunsets, makes me feel that I am in the presence of a goddess, and goes her way, while I continue to worship her.