Then came my Golden Age.  That means, then came Charlie into my life, when I felt for the first time that there was music in the birds’ voices and perfume in the flowers—­that there was light in the heavens above and on the earth beneath, for God was in heaven and Charlie was on earth—­when I, who had all along been hardly more than a human grasshopper, became the happiest of happy women—­so much happier, I thought, than I deserved.  For who was I, and what great thing had I ever done, that I should be crowned with such a crown of glory as—­Charlie? why should I, insignificant I, be so blest among women as to be taken to wife by Charlie?

I was insanely sentimental enough to rather resent the fact that Charlie was prosaically well off:  his circumstances were distressingly easy.  It would have been so much nicer, so deliciously romantic, if there had been an opportunity afforded me to show how ready, nay, eager, I was to sacrifice friends, home and country for his dear sake.  But Charlie didn’t want me to sacrifice my friends; nor did it require any great amount of heroism to exchange my modestly comfortable home for his decidedly luxurious one; and as for country, nothing on earth could have induced Charlie to leave his own country, much less his own parish, much less his own plantation.  So we were married without any talk of sacrifice on either side, and moved quietly enough from father’s small plantation to Charlie’s large one.

There was but one drawback to the perfectness of my happiness:  there was so little hope of my ever having an opportunity to air those magnanimous traits of character upon the possession of which I so plumed myself.  I felt sure that I could meet the most adverse circumstances with the most smiling patience, but circumstances obstinately refused to be adverse.  I was inwardly conscious that the most trying emergency could not shake my heroic but purely feminine fortitude; but, alas! my fortitude was likely to rust while waiting for the emergency.  Injury and wrong should be met with sublime dignity, but the most wildly speculative imagination could not look upon Charlie’s placidly handsome face and convert him into a possible tyrant.

To tell how the longed-for opportunity to exercise my powers of endurance, and my dignity, and all the rest of it, did finally come about, and to tell how I bore the test, is the object of this paper.

For the first six months of our married life, Charlie and I were simply ridiculously happy—­selfishly happy too.  We resented a neighbor’s visit as an act of barbarous invasion, and the necessity of returning such visits was acknowledged with a sublimity of resignation worthy of pictorial representation in that exquisite parlor manual, Fox’s Book of Martyrs.  If Charlie left the house for an hour or two, I looked upon his enforced absence as a cruel dispensation of Providence, which I did not bear with “fortitude and sublime dignity,” but pouted over like the ridiculous