The uninitiated wonder “what there is to write about.”  A man may have seen a girl the evening before, and yet a bulky letter comes in the afternoon.  And what mysterious interest can make one write three or four times a week?

Where is the girl whose love letter was left in pawn because she could not find her purse?  The grizzled veteran never collects the “two cents due” on the love letters that are a little overweight.  He would not put a value upon anything so precious, and he is seldom a cynic—­perhaps because, more than anyone else, he is the dispenser of daily joy.

The reading of old love letters is in some way associated with hair-cloth trunks, mysterious attics, and rainy days.  The writers may be unknown and the hands that laid them away long since returned to dust, but the interest still remains.

[Sidenote:  Dead Roses]

Dead roses crumble to ashes in the gentle fingers that open the long folded pages—­the violets of a forgotten spring impart a delicate fragrance to the yellowed spot on which they lay.  The ink is faded and the letter much worn, as though it had lain next to some youthful breast, to be read in silence and solitude until the tender words were graven upon the heart in the exquisite script of Memory.

The phrasing has a peculiar quaintness, old fashioned, perhaps, but with a grace and dignity all its own.  Through the formal, stately sentences the hidden sweetness creeps like the crimson vine upon the autumn leaves.  Brave hearts they had, those lovers of the past, who were making a new country in the wilderness, and yet there was an unsuspected softness—­the other “soul side” which even a hero may have, “to show a woman when he loves her.”

There are other treasures to be found with the letters—­old daguerreotypes, in ornate cases, showing the girlish, sweet face of her who is a grandmother now, or perhaps a soldier in the trappings of war, the first of a valiant line.

There are songs which are never sung, save as a quavering lullaby to some mite who will never remember the tune, and fragments of nocturnes or simple melodies, which awaken the past as surely as the lost shell brings to the traveller inland the surge and thunder of the distant sea.

[Sidenote:  The Mysteries of Life and Death]

All the mysteries of life and death are woven in with the letters; those pathetic remembrances which the years may fade but never destroy.  There are old school books, dog-eared and musty, scraps of rich brocade and rustling taffeta, the yellowed sampler which was the daily trial of some little maid, and the first white robe of someone who has grown children of his own.

[Sidenote:  Memory’s Singing]

Give Memory an old love letter and listen to her singing.  There is quiet at first, as though she were waiting for some step to die away, or some childish laughter to cease.  Then there is a hushed arpeggio, struck from strings which are old and worn, but sweet and tender still.