You would have liked Virginia, you know you would; but you perfectly hate the beldame aunt who sent for her to come to France; you think she must have been like the old schoolmistress, who occasionally boxes your ears with the cover of the spelling-book, or makes you wear one of the girls’ bonnets, that smells strongly of pasteboard and calico.

As for black Domingue, you think he was a capital old fellow; and you think more of him and his bananas than you do of the bursting, throbbing heart of poor Paul.  As yet Dream-life does not take hold on love.  A little maturity of heart is wanted to make up what the poets call sensibility.  If love should come to be a dangerous, chivalric matter, as in the case of Helen Mar and Wallace, you can very easily conceive of it, and can take hold of all the little accessories of male costume and embroidering of banners; but as for pure sentiment, such as lies in the sweet story of Bernardin de St. Pierre, it is quite beyond you.

The rich, soft nights, in which one might doze in his hammock, watching the play of the silvery moonbeams upon the orange-leaves and upon the waves, you can understand; and you fall to dreaming of that lovely Isle of France, and wondering if Virginia did not perhaps have some relations on the island, who raise pine-apples, and such sort of things, still?

——­And so with your head upon your hand in your quiet garret-corner, over some such beguiling story, your thought leans away from the book into your own dreamy cruise over the sea of life.

II.

School-Dreams.

It is a proud thing to go out from under the realm of a schoolmistress, and to be enrolled in a company of boys, who are under the guidance of a master.  It is one of the earliest steps of worldly pride, which has before it a long and tedious ladder of ascent.  Even the advice of the old mistress, and the ninepenny book that she thrusts into your hand as a parting gift, pass for nothing; and her kiss of adieu, if she tenders it in the sight of your fellows, will call up an angry rush of blood to the cheek, that for long years shall drown all sense of its kindness.

You have looked admiringly many a day upon the tall fellows who play at the door of Dr. Bidlow’s school; you have looked with reverence—­second only to that felt for the old village church—­upon its dark-looking, heavy brick walls.  It seemed to be redolent of learning; and stopping at times to gaze upon the gallipots and broken retorts at the second-story window, you have pondered in your boyish way upon the inscrutable wonders of Science, and the ineffable dignity of Dr. Bidlow’s brick school!

Dr. Bidlow seems to you to belong to a race of giants; and yet he is a spare, thin man, with a hooked nose, a large, flat, gold watch-key, a crack in his voice, a wig, and very dirty wristbands.  Still you stand in awe at the mere sight of him,—­an awe that is very much encouraged by a report made to you by a small boy, that “Old Bid” keeps a large ebony ruler in his desk.  You are amazed at the small boy’s audacity; it astonishes you that any one who had ever smelt the strong fumes of sulphur and ether in the Doctor’s room, and had seen him turn red vinegar blue, (as they say he does,) should call him “Old Bid!”