Page:The Single Hound; poems of a lifetime.djvu/23

 Rh in one, too bewilderingly to reproduce any definite impression, it is the fault of that face,—as animate in my memory as it is still in my dreams.

In spite of an innate austerity of the senses, my Aunt had lovers, like Browning's roses—"all the way"—to the end; men of varied profession and attainment who wrote to her and came to see her, and whose letters she burned with a chivalry not all of them requited in kind. "Sister Sue" was her confidante and ally, from whose lips we heard many a hot or quaint tale when time had made them no perfidy. One of these in which we most delighted was of how Aunt Emily as a young lady, having been decorously driven to a funeral in Hadley, in the family barouche lined with cream-colored broadcloth, ran from the grave with a dashing cousin from Worcester, via a skittish black horse and worldly buggy, capping her infamy by returning through Sunderland and being in her room with the door locked when the family got home.

Nothing would be more delicious to me than