“I used to hear from my uncle of your attachment,” said Sylvester, with his politest air of condolence, “and I assure you my opinion ever has been that your feelings did you honor.  Nothing, in my view, is so becoming to gray hairs and the evening of life as fidelity to a first passion.”

“Lord forgive you, Berkley!” I exclaimed, startled out of all self-possession by his impertinence.  “What on earth do you mean?  You are completely ignorant of what you are talking about.  I have hardly any gray hairs, and some excellent constitutions are gray at thirty.  You are partly bald yourself:  I know it from the way you turn up your love-locks.  And it was not Miss Ashburton I was talking about.  That is, if I did derive my reminiscences from her, it was with an object of a very different character at the end of the perspective.  I have adopted other views; that is, I have lately had presented to my mind—­”

[Illustration:  “KELLNER!”]

With these rhetorical somersaults, like the flappings of a carp upon the straw, did I express the mental distractions I was suffering from, and the tugs at my heart respectively administered by Francine’s cap-strings and Mary Ashburton’s shadowy tresses.  Berkley, diplomatically approving the landscape before us, would not get angry, would not be insulted, and offered no prise to my difficult temper.

“Tell me now, Sylvester,” said I after a few minutes’ silence.  “You are young, yet you have seen the world.  What is the best refuge, in your view, for a man of delicate sentiments and of ripe age?  Would you recommend such a person to shut himself up for ever in a hermitage of musty books, and to flirt there eternally with the memories of his young loves, who are become corpulent matrons or angular maids?  Or, don’t you think, now, that an autumnal attachment—­provided some sweet and healthy intelligence comes in contact with his own—­is a capital thing in its way?  The crackling fireside instead of the lovers’ walk?  The perfection of rational comfort subservient to, rather than dominating, his early dreams?  Respectful affection, fidelity and fondest care as the conditions surrounding one’s character, and upholding it in its best symmetry?  Cannot the poet think better if his body is kept snug?  Cannot the man of feeling remember better if his slippers are toasted and his buttons sewed?  In fact, is not one’s faith to a beloved ideal best shown by acquiring a fresh standing-point to see it from?”

“No doubt Hamlet’s mother thought so,” said Sylvester rather brutally, “and married King Claudius solely to brighten her ideal of her first husband.”  A more appropriate remark, it seemed to me, might have been found to chime in with my speculations.  “But here,” pursued the statesman, compromisingly, “are old memories protected by modern conveniences.  Here is the ‘Repose of Sophie.’”

We had mounted a terrace from whose eminence the whole spread of the valley was visible.  Profanation!  No sooner had we attained the plateau than a covered gallery appeared, and a Teutonic voice was heard with the familiar inquiry, “Will the gentlemen take wine or beer?”