Jersey Street and Jersey Lane | Page 8

a boy, you must remember that you were once in
love with a girl a great deal older than yourself. I am not speaking of
the big school-girl with whom you thought you were in love, for one
little while--just because she wouldn't look at you, and treated you like
a little boy. She had, after all, but a tuppenny temporary superiority to
you; and, after all, in the bottom of your irritated little soul, you knew it.
You knew that, proud beauty that she was, she might have to lower her
colors to her little sister before that young minx got into the first class
and--comparatively--long dresses.
No, I am talking of the girl you loved who was not only really grown
up and too old for you, but grown up almost into old-maidhood, and
too old perhaps for anyone. She was not, of course, quite an old maid,
but she was so nearly an old maid as to be out of all active competition
with her juniors--which permitted her to be her natural, simple self, and
to show you the real charm of her womanhood. Neglected by the men,
not yet old enough to take to coddling young girls after the manner of
motherly old maids, she found a hearty and genuine pleasure in your
boyish friendship, and you--you adored her. You saw, of course, as
others saw, the faded dulness of her complexion; you saw the wee
crow's-feet that gathered in the corners of her eyes when she laughed;
you saw the faint touches of white among the crisp little curls over her
temples; you saw that the keenest wind of Fall brought the red to her
cheeks only in two bright spots, and that no soft Spring air would ever
bring her back the rosy, pink flush of girlhood: you saw these things as
others saw them--no, indeed, you did not; you saw them as others could
not, and they only made her the more dear to you. And you were
having one of the best and most valuable experiences of your boyhood,
to which you may look back now, whatever life has brought you, with a
smile that has in it nothing of regret, of derision, or of bitterness.

[Illustration]
Suppose that this all happened long ago--that you had left a couple of
quarter-posts of your course of three-score-years-and-ten between that
young lover and your present self; and suppose that the idea came to
you to seek out and revisit this dear faded memory. And suppose that
you were foolish enough to act upon the idea, and went in search of her
and found her--not the wholesome, autumn-nipped comrade that you
remembered, a shade or two at most frostily touched by the winter of
old age--but a berouged, beraddled, bedizened old make-believe, with
wrinkles plastered thick, and skinny shoulders dusted white with
powder--ah me, how you would wish you had not gone!
And just so I wished that I had not gone, when, the other day, I was
tempted back to revisit the best beloved of all the homes of my
nomadic boyhood.
I remembered four pleasant years of early youth when my lot was cast
in a region that was singularly delightful and grateful and lovable,
although the finger of death had already touched its prosperity and
beauty beyond all requickening.
It was a fair countryside of upland and plateau, lying between a
majestic hill-bordered river and an idle, wandering, marshy, salt creek
that flowed almost side by side with its nobler companion for several
miles before they came together at the base of a steep, rocky height,
crowned with thick woods. This whole country was my playground, a
strip some four or five miles long, and for the most of the way a mile
wide between the two rivers, with the rocky, wooded eminence for its
northern boundary.
In the days when the broad road that led from the great city was a
famous highway, it had run through a country of comfortable
farm-houses and substantial old-fashioned mansions standing in
spacious grounds of woodland and meadow. These latter occupied the
heights along the great river, like a lofty breastwork of aristocracy,
guarding the humbler tillers of the soil in the more sheltered plains and
hollows behind them. The extreme north of my playground had been,

within my father's easy remembering, a woodland wild enough to
shelter deer; and even in my boyhood there remained patches of forest
where once in a while the sharp-eyed picked up gun-flints and brass
buttons that had been dropped among those very trees by the
marauding soldiery of King George III. of tyrannical memory. There
was no deer there when I was a boy. Deer go naturally with a hardy
peasantry, and not naturally, perhaps, but artificially, with the rich