"And yet," said Ethel, "there is something that takes my fancy mightily in these sweet and tranquil pictures. I have always felt sorrow when my shepherdess has been taken from her green meadows, even to a palace."
"Well, my vocation is not for innocent pleasures," returned Lady Marchmont: "I own I prefer my own kind to lambs and wild flowers."
"How entirely I agree with you," cried Walter Maynard: "as yet I know little of life, excepting from the written page; but existence appears to me scarcely existence, without its struggles and its success. I should like to have some great end before me; the striving to attain, amid a crowd of competitors, would make me feel all the energies of life"
"And yet," interrupted Courtenaye, "what hours of seeming delicious reverie I have seen you pass, flung on the bank of some lonely river, where the hours were mirrored in sunshine."
"I was thinking of the future," answered Walter, "and a very pleasant thing to think about."
"If we had but one of those charming old fairies for godmothers," said Norbourne, "of
