“I do promise, dear, dear, dearest one-!” I cried, trying to draw her to me, but she would not permit it.  “And you?”

“I shall never misunderstand,” she replied, as with a flash of white inward light.  “I know that you can never do anything that will make me think the less of you.”

Since the sad, sad day on which I caused the death of the Cardinal, I have paid little heed to the birds.  The subject has been a sore one.  Besides, my whole life is gradually changing under the influence of Georgiana, who draws me farther and farther away from nature, and nearer and nearer to my own kind.

When, two years ago, she moved into this part of the State, I dwelt on the outskirts of the town and of humanity.  On the side of them lay the sour land of my prose; the country, nature, rolled away on the other as the sweet deep ocean of my poetry.  I called my neighbors my manifestations of prose; my doings with the townspeople, prose passages.  The manifestations and passages scarce made a scrimp volume.  There was Jacob, who lived on his symptoms and died without any; there was and there is Mrs. Walters—­may she last to the age of the eagle.  In town, a couple of prose items of cheap quality:  an old preacher who was willing to save my soul while my strawberries were ripe, and an old doctor who cared to save my body so long as he could eat my pears—­with others interested severally in my asparagus, my rhubarb, my lilies, and sweet-peas.  Always not forgetting a few inestimably wholesome, cheery, noble souls, who sought me out on the edge of human life rather than succeeded in drawing me over the edge towards the centre.

But this Georgiana has been doing—­long without my knowing it.  I have become less a woodsman, more a civilian.  Unless she relents, it may end in my ceasing to be a lover of birds, and running for the Legislature.  Seeing me so much on the streets, one of my fellow-townsmen declared the other day that if I would consent to come out of the canebrakes for good they would make me postmaster.

It has fallen awkwardly for me that this enforced transformation in my tastes and habits should coincide with the season of my love-making; and it is well that Georgiana does not demand in me the capering or strutting manners of those young men of my day who likewise are exerting themselves to marry.  I am more like a badger than like one of them; and indeed I find the image of my fate and my condition in a badger-like creature close at hand.

For the carpenter who is at work upon bridal repairs in my house has the fancy not uncommon among a class hereabouts to keep a tamed raccoon.  He brings it with him daily, and fastens it by its chain to a tree in my front yard:  a rough, burly, knowing fellow, loving wild nature, but forced to acquire the tediousness of civilization; meantime leading a desperately hampered life; wondering at his own teeth and claws, and sorely put to it to invent a decent occupation.  So am I; and as the raccoon paces everywhere after the carpenter, so do I in spirit pace everywhere after Georgiana; only his chain seems longer and more easily to be broken.  The restless beast enlivens his captivity by the keenest scrutiny of every object within his range; I too have busied myself with the few people that have come this way.