es doing their best to
vegetate among the bricks of an enclosed court, where there is scanty
soil and never any sunshine. At present, though with no approach to
bloom, there were indications that the girl had human blood in her
veins.

Priscilla came softly to my bedside, and held out an article of
snow-white linen, very carefully and smoothly ironed. She did not seem
bashful, nor anywise embarrassed. My weakly condition, I suppose,
supplied a medium in which she could approach me.

"Do not you need this?" asked she. "I have made it for you." It was a
nightcap!

"My dear Priscilla," said I, smiling, "I never had on a nightcap in my
life! But perhaps it will be better for me to wear one, now that I am
a miserable invalid. How admirably you have done it! No, no; I never
can think of wearing such an exquisitely wrought nightcap as this,
unless it be in the daytime, when I sit up to receive company."

"It is for use, not beauty," answered Priscilla. "I could have
embroidered it and made it much prettier, if I pleased."

While holding up the nightcap and admiring the fine needlework, I
perceived that Priscilla had a sealed letter which she was waiting for
me to take. It had arrived from the village post-office that morning.
As I did not immediately offer to receive the letter, she drew it back,
and held it against her bosom, with both hands clasped over it, in a
way that had probably grown habitual to her. Now, on turning my eyes
from the nightcap to Priscilla, it forcibly struck me that her air,
though not her figure, and the expression of her face, but not its
features, had a resemblance to what I had often seen in a friend of
mine, one of the most gifted women of the age. I cannot describe it.
The points easiest to convey to the reader were a certain curve of the
shoulders and a partial closing of the eyes, which seemed to look more
penetratingly into my own eyes, through the narrowed apertures, than if
they had been open at full width. It was a singular anomaly of
likeness coexisting with perfect dissimilitude.

"Will you give me the letter, Priscilla?" said I.

She started, put the letter into my hand, and quite lost the look that
had drawn my notice.

"Priscilla," I inquired, "did you ever see Miss Margaret Fuller?"

"No," she answered.

"Because," said I, "you reminded me of her just now,--and it happens,
strangely enough, that this very letter is from her."

Priscilla, for whatever reason,