“I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff.  How very odd that I should have been so devotedly fond of that girl, at an age when I could neither feel passion, nor know the meaning of the word and the effect!  My mother used always to rally me about this childish amour, and at last, many years after, when I was sixteen, she told me one day, ’O Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh, and your old sweetheart, Mary Duff, is married to Mr C***.’  And what was my answer?  I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at that moment, but they nearly threw me into convulsions, and alarmed my mother so much, that after I grew better she generally avoided the subject—­to me—­and contented herself with telling it to all her acquaintance.”  But was this agitation the effect of natural feeling, or of something in the manner in which his mother may have told the news?  He proceeds to inquire.  “Now what could this be?  I had never seen her since her mother’s faux pas at Aberdeen had been the cause of her removal to her grandmother’s at Banff.  We were both the merest children.  I had, and have been, attached fifty times since that period; yet I recollect all we said to each other, all our caresses, her features, my restlessness, sleeplessness, my tormenting my mother’s maid to write for me to her, which she at last did to quiet me.  Poor Nancy thought I was wild, and, as I could not write for myself, became my secretary.  I remember too our walks, and the happiness of sitting by Mary, in the children’s apartment, at their house, not far from the Plainstones, at Aberdeen, while her lesser sister, Helen, played with the doll, and we sat gravely making love in our own way.

“How the deuce did all this occur so early?  Where could it originate?  I certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterward, and yet my misery, my love for that girl, were so violent, that I sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since.  Be that as it may, hearing of her marriage, several years afterward, was as a thunderstroke.  It nearly choked me, to the horror of my mother, and the astonishment and almost incredulity of everybody; and it is a phenomenon in my existence, for I was not eight years old, which has puzzled and will puzzle me to the latest hour of it.  And, lately, I know not why, the recollection (not the attachment) has recurred as forcibly as ever:  I wonder if she can have the least remembrance of it or me, or remember pitying her sister Helen, for not having an admirer too.  How very pretty is the perfect image of her in my memory.  Her dark brown hair and hazel eyes, her very dress—­I should be quite grieved to see her now.  The reality, however beautiful, would destroy, or at least confuse, the features of the lovely Peri, which then existed in her, and still lives in my imagination, at the distance of more than sixteen years.”