And in “calf love” I do not include the adumbrations of extreme childhood like those immortalised in Annabel Lee:—­

    I was a child and she was a child
    In that kingdom by the sea.

* * * * *

    But we loved with a love that was more than love,
    I and my Annabel Lee.

I know that love.  I had it when I was eight.  “She” was also eight, and she had just come from India.  She was frightfully plain, but then—­well, she had come from India.  She had all the romance of India’s coral strand about her, and it was India’s coral strand that I was in love with.  Moreover, she was a soldier’s daughter, and to be a soldier’s daughter was, next to being a soldier, the noblest thing in the world.  For that was about the time when, under the inspiration of The Story of the Hundred Days, I had set out with a bag containing a nightshirt and a toothbrush to enlist in the Black Watch. (It was a forlorn adventure that went no further than the railway station.) Finally she had given me, as a token of her love, Poor Little Gaspard’s Drum, wherein I read of Napoleon and the Egyptian desert, and, above all, of the Mamelukes.  How that word thrilled me!  “The Mamelukes!” What could one do but fall in love with a girl who used such incantations?

But this is not the true calf love.  That comes with the down upon the lip.  People laugh at “calf love,” but one might as well laugh at the wonder of dawn or the coming of spring.  When David Copperfield fell in love with the eldest Miss Larkins, he was really in love with the opening universe, and the eldest Miss Larkins happened to be the only available lightning conductor for his emotion.

The important thing is that you should contract “calf love” while you are young.  It is like the measles, which is harmless enough in childhood, but apt to be dangerous when you are grown up.  The “calf love” of an elderly man is always a disaster.  Hence the saying, “There’s no fool like an old fool.”  An elderly man should not fall in love.  He should walk into it.  He should survey the ground carefully as Mr. Barkis did.  That admirable man took the business of falling in love seriously: 

“‘So she makes,’ said Mr. Barkis, after a long interval of reflection, ’all the apple parsties, and does all the cooking, do she?’

“I replied that such was the fact.

“‘Well, I’ll tell you what,’ said Mr. Barkis.  ‘P’raps you might be writin’ to her?’

“‘I shall certainly write to her,’ I rejoined.

“‘Ah!’ he said, slowly turning his eyes towards me.  ’Well!  If you was writin’ to her, p’raps you’d recollect to say that Barkis was willin’, would you?’”

This is a model of caution in the art of middle-aged love-making.  The mistake of the “Northern Farmer” was that he applied the same middle-aged caution to youth.  “Doaent thou marry for munny; but goae wheer munny is,” he said to his son Sammy, who wanted to marry the poor parson’s daughter.  And he held up his own love-making as an inspiration for Sammy: