III.
BOY SENTIMENT.
WEEKS, and even years of your boyhood roll on, in the which your dreams are growing wider and grander, even as the Spring, which I have made the type of the boy-age, is stretching its foliage farther and farther, and dropping longer and heavier shadows on the land.
Nelly, that sweet sister, has grown into your heart strangely ; and you think that all they write in their books about love, cannot equal your fondness for little Nelly. She is pretty, they say ; but what do you care for her prettiness ? She is so good, so kind so watchful of all your wants, so willing to yield to your haughty claims !
But, alas, it is only when this sisterly love is lost forever, only when the inexorable world separates a family and tosses it upon the waves of fate to wide-lying distances perhaps to graves! that a man (37)
