They'll be with us morning, noon, and night," and he went on to work the joke of repining at his lot.

The worst thing, he said, would be the lovers' pretence of being interested in something besides themselves, which they were no more capable of than so many lunatics.

How could they care for pretty girls playing tennis on an upland level, in the waning afternoon?
Or a cartful of peasant women stopping to cross themselves at a way-side shrine?
Or a whistling boy with holes in his trousers pausing from some wayside raspberries to touch his hat and say good-morning?
Or those preposterous maidens sprinkling linen on the grass from watering-pots while the skies were full of rain?
Or that blacksmith shop where Peter the Great made a horseshoe.

Or the monument of the young warrior-poet Koerner, with a gentle-looking girl and her mother reading and knitting on a bench before it?
These simple pleasures sufficed them, but what could lovers really care for them?
A peasant girl flung down on the grassy road-side, fast asleep, while her yoke-fellow, the gray old dog, lay in his harness near her with one drowsy eye half open for her and the other for the contents of their cart; a boy chasing a red squirrel in the old upper town beyond the Tepl, and enlisting the interest of all the neighbors; the negro door-keeper at the Golden Shield who ought to have spoken our Southern English, but who spoke bad German and was from Cairo; the sweet afternoon stillness in the woods; the good German mothers crocheting at the Posthof concerts.

Burnamy as a young poet might hate felt the precious quality of these things, if his senses had not been holden by Miss Triscoe; and she might have felt it if only he had done so.