And now that I am alone in my room, and journalizing, it behooves me to gather up and record some of those words, precious from their rarity.  Flora and I, in our merry nonsense, had a mock dispute, and referred the matter to Miss Etty for arbitration.

“Etty, mind you side with me,” said Flora.

“Be an impartial umpire, Miss Etty,” said I, “and you will be on my side.”

Little Ugly was obliged to confess that she had not heard a word of the matter, her thoughts being elsewhere, intently engaged.

“I must request you to excuse my inattention,” she said, “and to repeat what you were saying.”

“The latter request I scorn to grant,” said I, “and the former we will consider about when we have heard what thoughts have been preferred to our most edifying conversation.”

“You shall tell us,” said Flora.  “Yes, or we till go off and leave you to your meditations, here in the dark woods, with the owls and the tree-toads, whom you probably prefer for company.”

Miss Etty condescended to confess she should be frightened without my manful protection.—­Quite a triumph!

“I must thank you,” she said, “for the novelty of an evening walk in the woods.  I enjoy it, I confess, very highly.  Look at those dark, mysterious vistas, and those deepening shadows blending the bank with its mirror; how different from the trite daylight truth!  It took strong hold of my imagination.”

“Go on.  And so you were thinking—­”

“I was hardly doing so much as thinking.  I was seeing it to remember.”

“Etty draws like an artist,” said Flora, in a whisper.

“I was taking a mental daguerreotype of my companions, by twilight, and of all the scene round, too, in the same grey tint, just to look at some ten or fifteen years hence, when—­”

“Let us all three agree,” said I, “on the 28th of September, 18—­, to remember this evening.  I am certain I shall look back to it with pleasure.”

“O horrid!” shrieked Flora; “how can you talk so!  By that time you will be a shocking, middle-aged sort of person!  I always wonder how people can be resigned to live, when they have lost youth, and with it all that makes life bearable!  Fifteen years!  Dismal thought!  I shall have outlived every thing I care about in life!” So moaned Little Handsome.

“But you may have found new sources of interest,” suggested I, perhaps a little too tenderly, for I had some sympathy with her dread of that particular phase of existence, middle-agedness.  “Perhaps as the mistress of a household—­”

“Worse and worse!” screamed Flora.  “A miserable comforter you are!  As if it were not enough merely to grow old, but one must be a slave and a martyr, never doing any thing one would prefer to do, nor going anywhere that one wants to go,—­bound for ever to one spot, and one perpetual companion—­”

“Planning dinners every day for cooks hardly less ignorant than yourself,” added I, laughing at her selfish horror of matronly bondage, yet provoked at it.  “Miss Etty, would you, if you could, stand still instead of going forward?”