the prettiest girl on Chaney Creek.  In childhood he had trotted her to Banbury Cross and back a hundred times, beguiling the tedium of the journey with kisses and the music of bells.  When the little girl was old enough to go to school, the big boy carried her books and gave her the rosiest apple out of his dinner-basket.  He fought all her battles and wrote all her compositions; which latter, by the way, never gained her any great credit.  When she was fifteen and he twenty he had his great reward in taking her twice a week during one happy winter to singing-school.  This was the bloom of life—­nothing before or after could compare with it.  The blacking of shoes and brushing of stiff, electric, bristling hair, all on end with frost and hope, the struggling into the plate-armor of his starched shirt, the tying of the portentous and uncontrollable cravat before the glass, which was hopelessly dimmed every moment by his eager breath,—­these trivial and vulgar details were made beautiful and unreal by the magic of youth and love.  Then came the walk through the crisp, dry snow to the Widow Barringer’s, the sheepish talk with the old lady while Susie “got on her things,” and the long, enchanting tramp to the “deestrick school-house.”

There is not a country-bred man or woman now living but will tell you that life can offer nothing comparable with the innocent zest of that old style of courting that was done at singing-school in the starlight and candlelight of the first half of our century.  There are few hearts so withered and old but they beat quicker sometimes when they hear, in old-fashioned churches, the wailing, sobbing or exulting strains of “Bradstreet” or “China” or “Coronation;” and the mind floats down on the current of these old melodies to that fresh young day of hopes and illusions—­of voices that were sweet, no matter how false they sang—­of nights that were rosy with dreams, no matter what Fahrenheit said—­of girls that blushed without cause, and of lovers who talked for hours about everything but love.

I know I shall excite the scorn of all the ingenuous youth of my time when I say that there was nothing that our superior civilization would call love making in those long walks through the winter nights.  The heart of Allen Golyer swelled under his satin waistcoat with love and joy and devotion as he walked over the crunching roads with his pretty enslaver.  But he talked of apples and pigs and the heathen and the teacher’s wig, and sometimes ventured an illusion to other people’s flirtations in a jocose and distant way; but as to the state of his own heart, his lips were sealed.  It would move a blase smile on the downy lips of juvenile Lovelaces, who count their conquests by their cotillons, and think nothing of making a declaration in an avant-deux, to be told of young people spending several evenings of each week in the year together, and speaking no word of love until they were ready to name their wedding-day.  Yet such was the sober habit of the place and time.