nificant,
as that each seems to understand a look or a word of the other. When the
young girl laid her hand on the Little Gentleman's arm,--which so greatly
shocked the Model, you may remember,--I saw that she had learned the
lion-tamer's secret. She masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind
of awe of him, as the man who goes into the cage has of the monster that
he makes a baby of.

One of two things must happen. The first is love, downright love, on the
part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man. You may
laugh, if you like. But women are apt to love the men who they think
have the largest capacity of loving;--and who can love like one that has
thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth and beauty, and seen it
fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the parched lips of him whose
fabled punishment is the perpetual type of human longing and
disappointment? What would become of him, if this fresh soul should
stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the flamingo drops out of
the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in the marshes of Cagliari, with
a flutter of scarlet feathers and a kindling of strange fires in the
shadowy waters that hold her burning image?

--Marry her, of course?--Why, no, not of course. I should think the
chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her than she
to marry him.

There is one other thing that might happen. If the interest he awakes in
her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in it, she will
glance off from him into some great passion or other. All excitements run
to love in women of a certain--let us not say age, but youth. An
electrical current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a bar
of iron lying within it, but not touching it. So a woman is turned into
a love-magnet by a tingling current of life running round her. I should
like to see one of them balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch
if she did not turn so as to point north and south,--as she would, if the
love-currents are like those of the earth our mother.

Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth's "Boy of Windermere"? This
boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud, mimicking the
hooting of the owls, who would answer him

"with quivering peals,
And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled."

When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for their