graphical error. The
name is Bedlo with an e, all the world over, and I never knew it to be
spelt otherwise in my life."

"Then," said I mutteringly, as I turned upon my heel, "then indeed has
it come to pass that one truth is stranger than any fiction--for Bedloe,
without the e, what is it but Oldeb conversed! And this man tells me
that it is a typographical error."

THE SPECTACLES

MANY years ago, it was the fashion to ridicule the idea of "love at
first sight;" but those who think, not less than those who feel deeply,
have always advocated its existence. Modern discoveries, indeed, in what
may be termed ethical magnetism or magnetoesthetics, render it probable
that the most natural, and, consequently, the truest and most intense
of the human affections are those which arise in the heart as if by
electric sympathy--in a word, that the brightest and most enduring
of the psychal fetters are those which are riveted by a glance. The
confession I am about to make will add another to the already almost
innumerable instances of the truth of the position.

My story requires that I should be somewhat minute. I am still a very
young man--not yet twenty-two years of age. My name, at present, is a
very usual and rather plebeian one--Simpson. I say "at present;" for it
is only lately that I have been so called--having legislatively
adopted this surname within the last year in order to receive a large
inheritance left me by a distant male relative, Adolphus Simpson,
Esq. The bequest was conditioned upon my taking the name of the
testator,--the family, not the Christian name; my Christian name is
Napoleon Bonaparte--or, more properly, these are my first and middle
appellations.

I assumed the name, Simpson, with some reluctance, as in my true
patronym, Froissart, I felt a very pardonable pride--believing that
I could trace a descent from the immortal author of the "Chronicles."
While on the subject of names, by the bye, I may mention a singular
coincidence of sound attending the names of some of my immediate
predecessors. My father was a Monsieur Froissart, of Paris. His wife--my
mother, whom he married at fifteen--was a Mademoiselle Croissart, eldest
daughter of Croissart the banker, whose wife, again, being only sixteen
when married, was the eldest daughter of one Victor Voissart. Monsieur
Voissart, very singularly, had married a lady of similar name--a
Mademoiselle Moissart. She, too, was quite a child when married; a