Page:The Clergyman's Wife.djvu/85

ver gray, a delicate fawn, or a soft dove color, lighted up and relieved by the gleam of crimson, or dark blue, or purple ribbons.

Then her age; she has passed the season of youth, of summer perhaps, and is verging upon autumn. A rich, mellow autumn, an autumn full of gorgeous tints, an autumn whose forest leaves turn to scarlet and gold without withering, an autumn that makes one think the spring-time could hardly have been so beautiful. True, the dewy, evanescent, morning freshness is gone, but in its place reigns the more lasting, self-renewed freshness of mental and physical vigor. In a word, Miriam has reached and passed the green ascent of thirty-five, and is calmly descending the verdant slope beyond. But life has been all gain to her; she has gathered fruits of knowledge, and flowers of beauty, and herbs of balm on the way, and lost nothing she does not think it well to part with, in exchange.

We have seldom met with an old maid, upon the pages of whose early history there was not some love tale inscribed, some story of unrequited affection, of betrayed hopes, of love sacrificed to duty, or, of the grave's untimely snatching away. But, strange to say, there is no love-tale written upon Miriam's book of life. She could never have been numbered among that large class of maidens who, according to Rasselas, "think they are in love, when in fact they are only idle." Her