I BELIEVE YOU had visited me in a vision before we ever met, like some foretaste of April before the spring broke into flower.

        That vision must have come when all was bathed in the odour of sal blossom; when the twilight twinkle of the river fringed its yellow sands, and the vague sounds of a summer afternoon were blended; yes, and had it not laughed and evaded me in many a nameless gleam at other moments?