Of course, I do not mean that these times are gone:  they are alive (in a modern fashion) in many places in the world; some of my friends have described them in prose and verse.  I only mean to say that I never was there; I was born unlucky.  I am willing to do my best, but I live in the commonplace.  Once or twice I have rashly tried my hand at dark conspiracies, and women rare and radiant in Italian bowers; but I have a friend who is sure to say, “Try and tell us about the butcher next door, my dear.”  If I look up from my paper now, I shall be just as apt to see our dog and his kennel as the white sky stained with blood and Tyrian purple.  I never saw a full-blooded saint or sinner in my life.  The coldest villain I ever knew was the only son of his mother, and she a widow,—­and a kinder son never lived.  I have known people capable of a love terrible in its strength; but I never knew such a case that some one did not consider its expediency as “a match” in the light of dollars and cents.  As for heroines, of course I know beautiful women, and good as fair.  The most beautiful is delicate and pure enough for a type of the Madonna, and has a heart almost as warm and holy as hers who was blessed among women. (Very pure blood is in her veins, too, if you care about blood.) But at home they call her Tode for a nickname; all we can do, she will sing, and sing through her nose; and on washing-days she often cooks the dinner, and scolds wholesomely, if the tea-napkins are not in order.  Now, what is anybody to do with a heroine like that?  I have known old maids in abundance, with pathos and sunshine in their lives; but the old maid of novels I never have met, who abandoned her soul to gossip,—­nor yet the other type, a lifelong martyr of unselfishness.  They are mixed generally, and are not unlike their married sisters, so far as I can see.  Then as to men, certainly I know heroes.  One man, I knew, as high a chevalier in heart as any Bayard of them all; one of those souls simple and gentle as a woman, tender in knightly honor.  He was an old man, with a rusty brown coat and rustier wig, who spent his life in a dingy village office.  You poets would have laughed at him.  Well, well, his history never will be written.  The kind, sad, blue eyes are shut now.  There is a little farm-graveyard overgrown with privet and wild grape-vines, and a flattened grave where he was laid to rest; and only a few who knew him when they were children care to go there, and think of what he was to them.  But it was not in the far days of Chivalry alone, I think, that true and tender souls have stood in the world unwelcome, and, hurt to the quick, have turned away and dumbly died.  Let it be.  Their lives are not lost, thank God!