LOVE AND AN OLD MAID I pray you be gentle with Dorothea.

Find, if you can, something admirable in this plain spinster keeping, at the age of thirty-seven, a room in her breast adorned and ready for first love; find it pitiful, if you must, that the blind boy should mistake his lodging; only do not laugh, or your laughter may accuse you in the sequel.
She had a most simple heart.

Wonder filled it as she rode home to Bayfield, and by the bridge she reined up Mercury as if to take her bearings in an unfamiliar country.

At her feet rushed the Axe, swollen by spring freshets; a bullfinch, wet from his bath, bobbed on the sand- stone parapet, shook himself, and piped a note or two; away up the stream, among the alders, birds were chasing and courting; from above the Bayfield elms, out of spaces of blue, the larks' song fell like a din of innumerable silver hammers.

Either new sense had been given her, or the rains had washed the landscape and restored obliterated lines, colours, meanings.