Your letter of excuses has arrived. I receive the letter but do not admit the excuses except in courtesy as when a man treads on your toes and begs your pardon -- the pardon is granted but the joint aches especially if there is a corn upon it.
The lapse of ages changes all things - time, language, the earth, the bounds of the sea, the stars of the sky, and every thing "about around and underneath" man, except man himself.
Maidens like moths are ever caught by glare, And Mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair.
Absence - that common cure of love.
For truth is always strange, stranger than fiction.