Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/339

 around the world on a slow sailing ship; for it was his voice, even in songs of sleep, that rendered this salutary exercise most difficult.

On one of these wakeful summer nights, however, I received a queer little shock. Perhaps I half dreamed it in some fugitive moment of half sleep; but it was as if I were again an awkward, silent boy, worshipping a girl new to the school, a girl who wore two long yellow braids. I worshipped her from afar so that she saw me not, being occupied with many adorers less timid, who made nothing of snatching a hair ribbon. But the face in that instant of dream was the face of Miss Katharine Lansdale, and coupled with the vision was a prescience that in some later life I should again look back and see myself as now, a grown but awkward boy, still holding aloof—still adoring from some remote background while other and bolder gallants captured trophies and lightly carolled their serenades. It seemed like borrowing trouble to look still farther into the future, but the vision was striking. Surely, History does repeat itself. I should have made this discovery for myself had it not been exploited before my day. For on the morrow I found my woman child on the Lansdale lawn when I went home in the afternoon. She had now reached an age when she was beginning to do "pretties" with her lips as she talked—almost at the age when I had first been enraptured by her mother, with the identical two braids, also the tassels dangling from her boot tops.