I suppose that, to Sir Roger, father is still the manly, debonair youth that he remembers thirty years ago.  In happy ignorance he slurs over the thirty intervening years of moroseness, and goes back to that blest epoch in which I have so much difficulty in believing, and about which he, walking beside me now and again through the tender, springing grass of the meadows, has told me many a tale.  For our promised walk has come off, and so has many others like it.

He must be dotingly fond of father.  It is the 15th of April.  I dare say, O reader, that it seems to you much like any other date, but to me, through every back-coming year, it seems to gain fresh significance—­the date that marks the most important day—­take it for all in all—­of my life, though, whether for good or ill, who shall say, until I am dead, and my life’s sum reckoned up.  I awake on that morning with no forecast of what is coming?  I tear myself from my morning dreams with as sleepy unwillingness as usual.  I eat my bread-and-butter with as stolidly healthy an appetite.  I run with as scampering feet, as evenly-beating a heart as is my wont, with little Vick along the garden-walks, in the royal morning sun.  For one of God’s own days has come—­one that must have lost his way, and strayed from paradise.

It has the steady heat of June, though we are only in mid-April, and the freshness of the prune.  The leaves on the trees are but tender and tiny, and through them the sun sends his might.  The tulips are all a-blaze and a-stare, making one blink with the dazzle of their odorless beauty:  the frolicsome young wind is shaking out their balm from the hyacinth-bells, and the sweet Nancies—­my flowers—­blowing all together, are swaying and congeeing to the morning airs.

O wise men, who know all things, do you know this?  Can you tell it me?  Where does the flower hide her scent?  From what full cup of hidden sweets does one suck it?

It is one of those days when one feels most convinced of being immortal—­when the spirits of men stretch out longing arms toward the All-Good, the Altogether Beautiful—­when souls thirst for God, yearn most deeply for the well of his unfathomed truth—­when, to those who have lost, their dead come back in most pleasant, gentle guise.  As for me, I have lost nothing and no one as yet.  All my treasures are still about me; I can stretch out live hands, and touch them alive; none of my dear names are yet to be spoken sparingly with bated breath, as too holy for common talk.  And yet I, too, as I walk and bask, and bend to smell the hyacinth-blooms, feel that same vague and most unnamed yearning—­a delicate pain that he who has it would barter for no boisterous joy.  The clocks tick out the scented hours, and with loud singing of happy birds, with pomp of flowers and bees, and freaked butterflies, God’s day treads royally past.