Ah! you sigh. Your heart, then, does forgive me—I knew it would. Give me your hand, (such a soft, white hand!) I confess the proverb did sound a little naughty, but it's not really so. At all events, it is the truth—and, you know, we
'Can not tell a lie!' G. W.
Ah! this hand, though soft and white, is no longer plump and unconscious; it has suffered! You, too, have been bored—ah! I must kiss it.
'I, too, am human.'
I also have been bored! Come, now, you mistrust me no longer-and I—I love you! I love you, and, therefore, I want to amuse you; perhaps, by Heaven's blessing, I may prove 'bad company' myself!
For I can not but believe that somewhere in the purple Future, or latent amid the green leaves of the possible Fairy-dom, (in which some rich enchanter of an uncle is to lea-re us all an heritage,) there bide, waitingly, certain dear friends—delightful, daring, witty, and wicked creatures—like yourself, O reader I—with whom I am destined to be, spiritually, 'very much married indeed;' or if the expression sound too polygamatical, let me simply say lié. [For Heaven's sake, accept that as French, warm with an accent, and not as English, cold without one.] Lié means 'bound'—anchored, so to speak, to an intimate in an amicable manner. And it is in their friendship—in their kind and tender words and courteous deeds, and winsome ways, that I most truly live.
Where these dearmost ones may bide, I know not. Seven—yes—seven I have met, whom I cherish like diamonds of delight in the cotton of memory. It is worth noting, my dear, in this connection, that sev-en is one of the conjugations in Turkish of the root sev, or 'loving,' and 'them old Turks,' you know—but I am digressing. Are there not still to come seven—yea, seventy times seven, (I have mislaid my Koran, in which the number is more accurately stated,) of my Friends of the Future!
But I know what they are like. Oh! the charming, delightful wretches, how I enjoy looking at them—in fact, 'I admire to see' them—as they sweep along through the golden halls of my Schloss Dream-berg. Such nice clothes as they wear—the ducks! Such good things as they say—such—such—
It is too warm to-day to attempt superlatives. It were better to drink—say, iced lemonade, in which—for you, dear reader—by some mistake a little sherry has been cobblered. Sherrare est humanum. The Rabbis, we are told, forbade the children of Israel to puff the fire on the Sabbath with bellows, though they might keep it going by blowing through a straw. Wherefore, to this day, certain of the devout 'keep it a-going' by means of a straw—only by some strange mistake in interpretation, or by some vowel-points getting mislaid, they, instead of blowing from them in the straw, suck toward them. And their 'society' is a large one.
But we were talking of 'good company,' as they say in 'good society'—not of 'good society,' as they say in 'good company.' And, therefore, although not 'a retired clergyman,' and devoutly hoping that my 'sands of life' are not by a very long while 'run out,' (for I want to see my future friends,) I would yet (without these advantages) offer you 'some slight relief,' and would seek to assuage your sufferings resulting from too much good company; and since we have so few friends in the past who have amused us, turn we our 'regards' to the possible