The Journal of a Disappointed Man

May 31. Sitting at tea in the farm house to-day E---- cried suddenly, pointing to a sandy cat in the garden: "There,--he's the father of the little kittens in the barn and I'll tell you how we know. P---- noticed the kittens had big feet and later on saw that old Tom stalking across the garden with big feet of exactly the same kind." "So you impute the paternity of the kittens to the gentleman under the laurel bushes?" I looked at the kittens to-night and found they had extra toes. "Mr. Sixtoes," as W---- calls him also possesses six toes, so the circumstantial evidence looks black against him. June 1. In the Beech Wood all the morning. Heigh-ho! it's grand to lie out as straight as a line on your back, gaze upwards into the tree above, and with a caressing eye follow its branches out into their multitudinous ramifications forward and back--luxurious travel for the tired eye. ... Then I would shut my eyes and try to guess where her next kiss would descend. Then I opened my eyes and watched her face in the most extravagant detail, I counted the little filaments on her precious mole and saw the sun thro' the golden down of her throat.... Sunlight and a fresh wind. A day of tiny cameos, little coups d'œil, fleeting impressions snapshotted on the mind: the glint on the keeper's gun as he crossed a field a mile away below us, sunlight all along a silken hawser which some Spider engineer had spun between the tops of two tall trees spanning the whole width of a bridle path, the constant patter of Shrew-mice over dead leaves, the pendulum of a Bumble-bee in a flower, and the just perceptible oscillation of the tree tops in the wind. While we are at meals the perfume of Lilac and Stocks pours in thro' the window and when we go to bed it is still pouring in by the open lattice.