Grace Lovering was not, it is true, a very youthful bride when she was made Hugh Willson’s wife, but had she been more beautiful than “Grace Greenwood’s” most exquisite dream of womanly loveliness, she had not proved more lovable to the wanderer, who, when the shadows of years were folding round him, found in her a friend, and a wife, and a worshiped ideal!
There were some who laughed, to be sure—there are always some that laugh and poh! at romances in real life—and some there were who said it was all fal de ral, the idea of a man and woman of such an age marrying for love. I only wish in its marvelous “progress” the world had not journeyed up to that icy peak whence all human love, and love matches among humans, is to be regarded as the folly of fools, and the madness of delusion!
Let the miserable woman now reading this page, who in her girlhood wedded wealth—or the wretched man who in his youth was led captive by the deceitful smiles of beauty—let these, if there be any such—and I know very well there are multitudes—look for once within the peaceful cottage where our hero and the dear heroine live, and if they do not speedily begin to think with amaze on their own paltry lives, and wonder when their romance is to begin, then—why then—I will not strive any more to teach the people!
Look you, reader, and more especially if you be young and beautiful, do not sell your birthright for a tasteless mess of pottage—ah, in that case you may as well begin to look for a tragedy, and a fearful kind of denouement, instead of a romance and a pleasant closing of the scene!
And furthermore the Wayside Voice saith not.
THE PILGRIM’S FAST.[[1]]
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BY MRS. MARY G. HORSFORD.
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