Sweet has been the charm of childhood on my spirit throughout my ramble with little Annie.  Say not that it has been a waste of precious moments, an idle matter, a babble of childish talk and a reverie of childish imaginations about topics unworthy of a grown man’s notice.  Has it been merely this?  Not so—­not so.  They are not truly wise who would affirm it.  As the pure breath of children revives the life of aged men, so is our moral nature revived by their free and simple thoughts, their native feeling, their airy mirth for little cause or none, their grief soon roused and soon allayed.  Their influence on us is at least reciprocal with ours on them.  When our infancy is almost forgotten and our boyhood long departed, though it seems but as yesterday, when life settles darkly down upon us and we doubt whether to call ourselves young any more,—­then it is good to steal away from the society of bearded men, and even of gentler woman, and spend an hour or two with children.  After drinking from those fountains of still fresh existence we shall return into the crowd, as I do now, to struggle onward and do our part in life—­perhaps as fervently as ever, but for a time with a kinder and purer heart and a spirit more lightly wise.  All this by thy sweet magic, dear little Annie!

WAKEFIELD.

In some old magazine or newspaper I recollect a story, told as truth, of a man—­let us call him Wakefield—­who absented himself for a long time from his wife.  The fact, thus abstractedly stated, is not very uncommon, nor, without a proper distinction of circumstances, to be condemned either as naughty or nonsensical.  Howbeit, this, though far from the most aggravated, is perhaps the strangest instance on record of marital delinquency, and, moreover, as remarkable a freak as may be found in the whole list of human oddities.  The wedded couple lived in London.  The man, under pretence of going a journey, took lodgings in the next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife or friends and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment, dwelt upward of twenty years.  During that period he beheld his home every day, and frequently the forlorn Mrs. Wakefield.  And after so great a gap in his matrimonial felicity—­when his death was reckoned certain, his estate settled, his name dismissed from memory and his wife long, long ago resigned to her autumnal widowhood—­he entered the door one evening quietly as from a day’s absence, and became a loving spouse till death.

This outline is all that I remember.  But the incident, though of the purest originality, unexampled, and probably never to be repeated, is one, I think, which appeals to the general sympathies of mankind.  We know, each for himself, that none of us would perpetrate such a folly, yet feel as if some other might.  To my own contemplations, at least, it has often recurred, always exciting wonder, but with a sense that the