IV.Our hero held that Lizard-love was a sentiment unknown, yet beneath the stone on which he sunned himself, a pair of bright eyes feasted upon his every look and action, and a little heart throbbed for him alone. This romantic worshipper feeling that she might just as well lavish her love upon a stone, that her adoration was unobserved, and her passion unrequited, sank into a state of despondency. Haunted by dark doubts, she at last thought of death as the end of her sorrows.In her extremity, she inquired of an old Rat, whether it was better to live and suffer, or to die and be done with dreams and delusions?“Die, of course,” said the Rat, “if you cannot make yourself agreeable.”“I will die!” she exclaimed; “but he shall know the reason, he shall know all!”Such is the force of a noble resolution, that the little Lizard who had never till now dared to look her loved one in the face, came forward. But her approaches were met by the gradual retreat of our hero, for he was naturally timid in the presence of females.“Stay,” cried the little one in a tone of despair. “I love you, and you do not even know that I exist. I must die.”“Don’t die, my dear,” he kindly replied; “that would be highlyimproper. What do you mean by saying you love me? I am a stranger to you, yet a joke comes well from those pretty lips.”He instantly perceived, for he was an honest fellow, that his cold doubts wounded her sensitive nature, and a light warmer and brighter than the sun flashed from her eyes and took possession of him. He was conquered—he proposed, and they were married.It always happens so with bachelors. It is the last straw that breaks the camel’s back, in love as in life.Our hero still glories in the sunshine, and takes his ease stretched out before his own doorway.
Our hero held that Lizard-love was a sentiment unknown, yet beneath the stone on which he sunned himself, a pair of bright eyes feasted upon his every look and action, and a little heart throbbed for him alone. This romantic worshipper feeling that she might just as well lavish her love upon a stone, that her adoration was unobserved, and her passion unrequited, sank into a state of despondency. Haunted by dark doubts, she at last thought of death as the end of her sorrows.
In her extremity, she inquired of an old Rat, whether it was better to live and suffer, or to die and be done with dreams and delusions?
“Die, of course,” said the Rat, “if you cannot make yourself agreeable.”
“I will die!” she exclaimed; “but he shall know the reason, he shall know all!”
Such is the force of a noble resolution, that the little Lizard who had never till now dared to look her loved one in the face, came forward. But her approaches were met by the gradual retreat of our hero, for he was naturally timid in the presence of females.
“Stay,” cried the little one in a tone of despair. “I love you, and you do not even know that I exist. I must die.”
“Don’t die, my dear,” he kindly replied; “that would be highlyimproper. What do you mean by saying you love me? I am a stranger to you, yet a joke comes well from those pretty lips.”
He instantly perceived, for he was an honest fellow, that his cold doubts wounded her sensitive nature, and a light warmer and brighter than the sun flashed from her eyes and took possession of him. He was conquered—he proposed, and they were married.
It always happens so with bachelors. It is the last straw that breaks the camel’s back, in love as in life.
Our hero still glories in the sunshine, and takes his ease stretched out before his own doorway.