an age to which his own is of patriarchal
antiquity.

But why this lover of the beautiful should be so drawn to one whom Nature
has wronged so deeply seems hard to explain. Pity, I suppose. They say
that leads to love.

--I thought this matter over until I became excited and curious, and
determined to set myself more seriously at work to find out what was
going on in these wild hearts and where their passionate lives were
drifting. I say wild hearts and passionate lives, because I think I can
look through this seeming calmness of youth and this apparent feebleness
of organization, and see that Nature, whom it is very hard to cheat, is
only waiting as the sapper waits in his mine, knowing that all is in
readiness and the slow-match burning quietly down to the powder. He will
leave it by-and-by, and then it will take care of itself.

One need not wait to see the smoke coming through the roof of a house and
the flames breaking out of the windows to know that the building is on
fire. Hark! There is a quiet, steady, unobtrusive, crisp, not loud, but
very knowing little creeping crackle that is tolerably intelligible.
There is a whiff of something floating about, suggestive of toasting
shingles. Also a sharp pyroligneous-acid pungency in the air that stings
one's eyes. Let us get up and see what is going on.--Oh,--oh,--oh! do
you know what has got hold of you? It is the great red dragon that is
born of the little red eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing red
manes, and his thousand lashing red tails, and his multitudinous red eyes
glaring at every crack and key-hole, and his countless red tongues
lapping the beams he is going to crunch presently, and his hot breath
warping the panels and cracking the glass and making old timber sweat
that had forgotten it was ever alive with sap. Run for your life! leap!
or you will be a cinder in five minutes, that nothing but a coroner would
take for the wreck of a human being!

If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away comparison,
I shall be much obliged to him. All I intended to say was, that we need
not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know that they are full of
combustibles and that a spark has got among them. I don't pretend to say
or know what it is that brings these two persons together;--and when I
say together, I only mean that there is an evident affinity of some kind
or other which makes their commonest intercourse strangely sig