rine outstretched, a young girl,
fourteen or fifteen years old. She spoke again,--_"S'il vous plait,
Monsieur."_ Large, lustrous, beaming eyes were turned on me,--not
boldly, not with assurance, neither altogether bashfully,--but honestly
regarding me full in the face, questioning if, after being so attentive
a spectator, I were willing to bestow something. It was strange I had
not noticed this girl before. I had hardly perceived there were three
in the company. Now that I did observe her, I kept looking so earnestly
that I forgot to respond to her request. She was faultless in form and
physical development,--absolutely and unequivocally faultless. Her face,
though browned by constant exposure, was classically beautiful; the foot
and hand very small and delicate. Heavens! how every fibre in my frame
thrilled with an ecstatic emotion, as, for the first time in my life, I
was brought under the influence of female charms! My head swam, my eyes
grew dim,--I staggered. I think I should have fallen, had not the young
girl herself seized my arm and supported me. This brought me to myself.
I bestowed nothing on the strollers, but asked if they were coming to
the village. They answered in the affirmative; and telling them to come
and play at the inn where I was lodging, I hastily quitted the scene.

Do not think I am in the least exaggerating in this narrative. God
knows, what I have to recount is sufficiently extraordinary. I hastened
homeward, my soul in a tumult. On a sudden, the labor of a lifetime was
destroyed, the opinions and convictions of a lifetime stultified and set
at nought. And how?--by what? By a strolling, vagrant Savoyard. Rather
by an exquisite specimen of God's handiwork in flesh and blood! And if
God's handiwork, why might I _not_ be roused and touched and thrilled
and entranced? Something within boldly, in fact audaciously, put that
question to me.

I slept none that night. I was haunted by that form and face. I essayed
to be calm, and to compose myself to slumber. Impossible! For the moment
was swept away my past, with its dreary, lifeless forms, its ghostly
ceremonies, its masked shapes, its soulless, rayless, emotionless
existence. To awake and find life has been one grand error,--to awake
and know that youth and early manhood are gone, and that you have been
cheated of your honest and legitimate enjoyments,--to feel that Pleasure
might have wooed you gracefully when young, and when it would become
you