This episode of Bright hearth is brought to you by Ideal Poultry, The Kings Ridge Elderberries,

Backwards Planning Financial, and by our supporters at Patreon.com.

We sat within the farmhouse old whose windows looking o'er the bay gave to the sea breeze

damp and cold and easy entrance night and day.

Not far away we saw the port, the strange old-fashioned silent town, the lighthouse, the

dismantled fort, the wooden houses quaint and brown. We sat and talked until the

night descending filled the little room. Our faces faded from the sight, our voices only broke the gloom.

We spake of many a vanished scene, of what we once had thought and said, of what had been and might have been, and who was changed and who was dead.

And all that fills the hearts of friends when first they feel with secret pain, their lives

thenceforth have separate ends and never can be won again.

The first slight swerving of the heart that words are powerless to express and leave it still

and said in part or say it into great excess. The very tones in which we spake had something strange

I could but mark. The leaves of memory seemed to make a mournful rustling in the dark. Off dyed the words upon our lips as suddenly from out the fire, built of the

wreck of stranded ships, the flames would leap and then expire. And as their

splendour flashed and failed, we thought of wrecks upon the main, of ships

dismasted that were hailed and sent no answer back again.

The windows rattling in their frames, the ocean roaring up the beach, the gusty

blast, the bickering flames, all mingled vaguely in our speech.

Until they made themselves a part of fancies floating through the brain, the long lost ventures of the heart

that send no answers back again.

O flames that glowed, O hearts that yearned, they were indeed too much akin.

The drift would fire without that burned,

...