ncident of my third voyage up the Nile. It is really not worth reading.
I have written it down merely for a few friends who know something of
the facts; and also to escape the annoyance of having to tell it over as
one of the features of my four years' travel in the Orient. But to
begin. Wearying of the Levant, I was resting a time in Rome, when I was
formally invited, as well as specially urged, to witness the marriage
ceremony between the Grand Duchess Alexandria and the Duke of Edinburgh.
Let us pass over these wasteful follies, the waste of time, the waste of
sense, of soul! I have only mentioned the reason for my presence in St.
Petersburg; have only mentioned the fact of my being there, because I
saw a face in that gathering of people that could not be forgotten. It
was the face of a tall, dark, and serenely silent Dolores; a young woman
who had surely met and made the acquaintance of sorrow early in the
morning of life. I sometimes wonder if I could ever have known or cared
to know any one who had not sorrowed deeply. And yet I now know very
well that, in whatever guise that woman could have come, there could
have been no two roads for us from the day of her coming to the day of
her going.

Let me be a little confidential right here. I knew, I had always known,
I should meet this woman. I had waited for her; worked hard, built up
the battlements and the fortress of my soul so that I might receive her
into it; and defend her well against my baser self when she should come.
And now tell me--have you never had a thought, a conviction like this? A
certainty in your own heart that your other and better self would come
to you complete and entire some day, soon or late, so soon as you might
have the fortress ready? The doctors said she was dying. She had been
trying to stand between the Czar and the Jews. She may not have been of
that "peculiar people," but I think she had the money of Rothschilds and
Sir Moses Montefiore behind her.

There had been attempts at assassination, followed by executions. Some
of the condemned were women. It was as if this woman herself had been
condemned to death. I think she suffered more than all the others put
together; she was so very, very sensitive to the pain and sorrow of
others.

There are souls like that. But there is a good God. The soul that
suffers keenly can and shall enjoy keenly. You can, if you care to
persist in it, make yourself, as the centuries wheel past, more than an