“MY AUNT WAS DOZING”
This is what I would be doing in the present book;—I would catch up here and there the shreds of feeling, which the brambles and roughnesses of the world have left tangling on my heart, and weave them out into those soft and perfect tissues, which—if the world had been only a little less rough—might now perhaps enclose my heart altogether.
“Ah,” said my Aunt Tabithy, as she smoothed the stocking-leg again, with a sigh—“there is after all but one youth-time; and if you put down its memories once, you can find no second growth.”
My Aunt Tabithy was wrong. There is as much growth in the thoughts and feelings that run behind us, as in those that run before us. You may make a rich, full picture of your childhood to-day; but let the hour go by, and the darkness stoop to your pillow with its million shapes of the past, and my word for it, you shall have some flash of childhood lighten upon you that was unknown to your busiest thought of the morning.
“THE JUSTICE OF THE PEACE”
I know no nobler forage-ground for a romantic, venturesome, mischievous boy, than the garret of an old family mansion on a day of storm. It is a perfect field of chivalry. There is great fun in groping through a tall barrel of books and pamphlets, on the look-out for startling pictures; and there are chestnuts in the garret, drying, which you have discovered on a ledge of the chimney; and you slide a few into your pocket, and munch them quietly—giving now and then one to Nelly, and begging her to keep silent;—for you have a great fear of its being forbidden fruit.
