Unfortunately for my pupil's progress, the game of backgammon proved less entertaining than our own conversation, so, after a very feeble attempt on the one side to learn and on the other to teach, we closed the board and began to talk;—first of the past, then of the future, the happy future, which we were to share.

There is no need that I should set down this lovers' talk. Is it not written on my heart? The future seemed so fair and unclouded to me, as my love and I sat talking together yesterday afternoon. Now all is changed. The strangest, the most surprising complications have arisen; and I doubt, I fear.

After we had talked for a long time, Miss Halliday suddenly proposed that I should read to her.

"Diana once told me that you read very beautifully," said this flatterer; "and I should so like to hear you read—poetry of course. You will find plenty of poems in that old bookcase—Cowper, and Bloomfield, and Pope. Now I am sure that Pope is just the kind of poet whose verses you would read magnificently. Shall we explore the bookcase together?"

Now if there is any manner of beguiling an idle afternoon, which seems to me most delightful, it is by the exploration of old bookcases; and when that delight can be shared by the woman one fondly loves, the pleasure thereof must be of course multiplied to an indefinite amount.

So Charlotte and I set to work immediately to ransack the lower shelves of the old-fashioned mahogany bookcase, which contained the entire library of the Mercer household.

I am bound to admit that we did not light upon many volumes of thrilling interest. The verses of Cowper, like those of Southey, have always appeared to me to have only one fault—there are too many of them. One shrinks appalled from that thick closely-printed volume of morality cut into lengths of ten feet; and beyond the few well-worn quotations in daily use, I am fain to confess that I am almost a stranger to the bard of Olney.

Half a dozen odd volumes of the Gentleman's Magazine, three or four of the Annual Register, a neatly-bound edition of Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles Grandison in twelve volumes, Law's Holy Call to a Serious Life, Paradise Lost, Joseph Andrews, Hervey's Meditations, and Gulliver's Travels, formed the varied contents of the principal shelves. Above, there were shabbily-bound volumes and unbound pamphlets. Below, there were folios, the tops whereof were thickly covered with the dust of ages, having escaped the care of the handmaidens even in that neatly-appointed household.

I knelt down to examine these.

"You'll be covered with dust if you touch them," cried Charlotte. "I was once curious enough to examine them, but the result was very disappointing."

"And yet they look so delightfully mysterious," I said. "This one, for instance?"