t was there not
sitting directly opposite to me one of the most exquisitely beautiful
of God's lovely women; and did not her saucy, demure eyes seem to read
my very soul? I therefore restrained a display of my feelings, for it
would not have appeared in the least dignified or proper in a
fine-looking young man (such as I imagined myself to be) of
four-and-twenty, to be seen with eyes streaming like a young girl.

More than once, during our short stage-coach ride had our eyes met;
and hers had revealed to me a living well of spiritual beauty; and
although they were withdrawn as soon as they encountered mine--not
coquettishly, but with true feminine modesty--still they were not
turned away until our mutual eyes had flashed one electrical spark of
mutual understanding and mutual sympathy, that whole volumes of dull
words could never express either as vividly or as truly. What a
heaven-born mystery is contained in the glance of an eye: it can kill
and can make alive; it can fill the heart with a sudden and delicious
ecstasy, and it can plunge it into the deepest, darkest despair.

I gave her one last look as the stage stopped before my father's door,
and if it expressed one tithe of what I felt, it told her of my warm
admiration of her glorious beauty, and of my sorrow at leaving her,
perhaps forever, without knowing more of her.

For the time the matchless image of my stage-coach companion was lost
in the loving embraces and tender greetings of my family. I felt it
truly refreshing, after six years of exile from my own kith and kin,
to be caressed and made much of; to be told by three deliciously
beautiful, exquisitely graceful sisters, hanging around one, and
kissing one every other word, to be told how much the few last years
had improved one, how handsome, &c. one was grown; was it not enough
to somewhat turn one's brain, and make one a little vain and
considerably happy.

In the still hush of the night, after finding myself once more in my
own room--_my_ room, with its cabinets of shells and mosses, that I
had collected when a boy in my various trips to the seashore, all
religiously left arranged as I had left them, its guns, fishing-rods,
stuffed rabbits and birds, its preserved rattle-snakes and cases of
insects, all of which had stood for so long a time in their respective
places that they had become a part of the room--in the still hush of
the night the divine image of my most beautiful stage-coach companion
a