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Rh self on my back, and, floating thus, fixed my eyes upon the face of the moon.

“The moon is well enough in her way, however you may look at her; but her appearance is, to say the least of it, peculiar to a man floating on his back in the centre of a stone tank, with a dead wall of some fifteen or twenty feet rising squarely on every side of him!” (The young man smiled bitterly as he said this, and shuddered once or twice before he went on musingly.) “The last time I had noted the planet with any emotion she was on the wane. Mary was with me; I had brought her out here one morning to look at the view from the top of the Reservoir. She said little of the scene, but as we talked of our old childish loves, I saw that its fresh features were incorporating themselves with tender memories of the past, and I was content.

“There was a rich golden haze upon the landscape, and as my own spirits rose amid the voluptuous atmosphere, she pointed to the waning planet, discernible like a faint gash in the welkin, and wondered how long it would be before the leaves would fall. Strange girl! did she mean to rebuke my joyous mood, as if we had no right to be happy while Nature, withering in her pomp, and the sickly moon, wasting in the blaze of noontide, were there to remind us of ‘the-gone-forever’? ‘They will all renew themselves, dear Mary,’ said I, encouragingly, ‘and there is one that will ever keep tryst alike with thee and 128