auty, splendor of dress, jewels, and rich uniforms enter, broke
upon the sight, while a kind of magnetic sense of expectancy seemed
to pervade all, and make conversation a mere murmur. The
opera--a well-known one of a favorite composer, aud admirably
sustained--attracted little attention. The thrilling cadences, the
brilliant passages, all fell upon senses that had no relish for their
excellence; and even the conventional good-breeding of the spectators
was not proof against the signs of impatience that every now and then
were manifested.

The third act at last began, and the scene represented a Spanish village
of the New World, which, had it been even less correct and true to
nature, had yet possessed no common attraction for Roland,--recalling by
a hundred little traits a long unvisited but well-remembered land. The
usual troops of villagers paraded about in all that mock grace which
characterizes the peasant of the ballet. There were the same active
mountaineers, the same venerable fathers, the comely matrons with little
baskets of nothing carefully covered by snowy napkins, and the young
maidens, who want only beauty to make them what they affect to be.
Roland gazed at all this with the indifference a stupid prelude ever
excites, and would rapidly have been wearied, when a sudden pause in the
music ensued, and then a deathlike stillness reigned through the house.
The orchestra again opened, and with a melody which thrilled through
every fibre of Roland's heart. It was a favorite Mexican air; one
to which, in happier times, he had often danced. What myriads of old
memories came flocking to his mind as he listened! What fancies came
thronging around him! Every bar of the measure beat responsively
with some association of the past. He leaned his head downwards, and,
covering his face with his hands, all thought of the present was lost,
and in imagination he was back again on the greensward before the "Villa
de las Noches;" the mocking-bird and the nightingale were filling
the air with their warblings; the sounds of gay voices, the plash of
fountains, the meteor-like flashes of the fireflies, were all before
him. He knew not that a thousand voices were shouting around him
in wildest enthusiasm,--that bouquets of rarest flowers strewed the
stage,--that every form adulation can take was assumed towards one on
whom every eye save his own was bent; and that before her rank, beauty,
riches--all that the world makes its idols