Her Birthday

well, I want some record of these good, gay
days of our early companionship ; something
that may still survive when this right hand is
dust ; a testimony that there lived at least
one man who was joyously content with the
small mercies which came to him in the
beaten way of nature. For neither of us,
little woman, can these childish, hilarious
days last much longer now. Five arch,
happy faces look out at me from the sections
of an oblong frame; all W. V.’s, but no two
the same W. V. The sixth must go. into
another frame. You must say good-bye to
the enchanted Forest, little lass, and travel -
into strange lands; and the laws of infancy
are harder than the laws of old Wales. For
these ordained that when a person remained
in a far country under such conditions that
he could not freely revisit his own, his title
to the ancestral soil was not extinguished
till the ninth man; the ninth man could
utter his “cry over the abyss,” and save his
portion. But when you have gone into the
world beyond, and can no more revisit the
Forest freely, no ear will ever listen to your
‘cry over the abyss.”
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