composure returned, and she raised me with a smile.

"'If you would win any woman,' she said meaningly, 'you must first be
a man. You are not a man, Luke. You are a child! You have shut the
sunlight from you, and the trill of a thrush pierces you like an
arrow. Would you cage your wife in the gloominess of this sepulchre?
Would you hush her songs, and tremble beneath her caresses, and die in
the delights of her love? Go! Open the window of this vault! Mingle
with the crowds of cities! Ascend into the mountains! Cross the seas!
Become worthy of my affection, and then entreat me again!'

"She had shown me the abject thing I was. Her conditions were harder
than death; but the hope she had spoken was like a glimpse of Heaven,
and I answered,

"'Heraine, I will do it!'

"In a month I set out for my travels. An easy coach conveyed me to
London, and the third day I lay sick in Paris. Sore of body and brain,
strained in nerve and stunned in sense, I persisted in my resolve, and
was whirled, more dead than alive, across the Continent to Berlin. In
the period of three months I had traversed all the leading kingdoms
and pushed my purpose to the sandy banks of the Nile. Every moment in
this journey was an infinity of torture; but in the bitterest pangs I
remembered the divine consummation, and kept on. My infirmities were
increased rather than diminished. In the deepest thunder I could hear
the delving of the beetle; and though the whole vault blazed with
electric light, I could see the twinkle of the glow-worm. But among
the multitude of noises which haunted me, the most persistent were the
footfalls of men. There were pauses in the lives of all other beings.
The weasel and the hyena rested sometimes, and I could avoid their
haunts, but men were forever alert and ubiquitous. I heard them in
abysses, upon peaks, and in wildernesses. They trod upon my nerves;
they crushed sleep from my soul. I closed my ears in vain; I fled
without refuge; I prayed without avail. The patter of little children,
the footfall of the maiden, the elastic pace of the youth, the racking
limp of the cripple, the veteran hobbling upon his wooden stump, the
confused tread of crowds, the steady tramp of soldiers--these tortured
me by daylight, and I kept penance at midnight with the going of
outcasts and vagrants.

"I learned to classify these footfalls. My sensations of them were so
keen that my memory retained them. I recognized individuals, not by
th