YOUR FIRST SWEETHEART

  You never can forget her. She was so very young - and innocent and pretty. She had such a way of look­ing at you over her hymn book in church. She alone, of all the world, did not think you a boy of eighteen, but wondered at your size, and your learning, and of your faint foreshadowing of a sandy moustache, and believed I you every inch a man. When at those stupid evening parties, when boys who should have been in the nursery and girls who should have eaten suppers of bread and milk and gone to sleep hours before, waltzed and flirted, and made themselves ill over oysters and late suppers, you were favored by a glance of her eye or a whisper from her lip, you ascended to the seventh heaven im­mediately. When once upon a certain memorable eve she polkaed with the druggist's clerk, and never looked at you, how miserable you were. It is funny to think of now, but it was not so funny then, for you were awfully in earnest.

     Once, at a picnic, she wore a white dress, and had roses twined in her black hair, and she looked so like a bride that you fairly trembled. Some time, you thought, in just such snowy costume, with just such blossoms in her hair, she might stand beside the altar, and you, most blessed of all mortals, might place a golden ring upon her finger; and when you were left alone with her for a moment some of your thoughts would form themselves into words, and though she blushed and ran away, and would not let you kiss her, she did not seem angry. And then you were parted, somehow, for a little while, and when you met again she was walking with a gentleman of twenty-eight or thirty, and had neither word nor smile for you. Shortly after this some well-meaning gossip informed you that she was engaged to the tall gentleman and that it was a "splendid match." It was terrible news to you, and sent you off to the great city, where, after a good deal of youthful grief, and many resolutions to die and haunt her, you recovered your equanimity, and began to make money and to call love stuff and nonsense.

You have a rich wife of your own now, and grown children-aye, even two or three toddling grand­children about your hearth; your hair is gray, and you lock your heart up in the fireproof safe at your counting­house when you go home at night. And you thought you had forgotten that little episode of your nineteenth year, until the other day when you read of her death. You know she had come to be a rather stout matron who wore glasses, but your heart went back and you saw her smiling and blushing, with her golden hair, dreaming of wedding robes and rings, and you laid your gray old head upon your office desk and wept for the memory of your first sweetheart.

From an Old Scrapbook~