properly adjusted,
and watch if she did not turn so as to point north and south,--as she
would, if the love-currents are like those of the earth our mother.

Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth's "Boy of Windermere"? This
boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud, mimicking the
hooting of the owls, who would answer him

"with quivering peals,
And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled."

When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for
their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far distant
waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint itself with new
force upon his perceptions.--Read the sonnet, if you please;--it is
Wordsworth all over,--trivial in subject, solemn in style, vivid in
description, prolix in detail, true metaphysically, but immensely
suggestive of "imagination," to use a mild term, when related as an
actual fact of a sprightly youngster.

All I want of it is to enforce the principle, that, when the door of the
soul is once opened to a guest, there is no knowing who will come in
next.

--Our young girl keeps up her childish habit of sketching heads and
characters. Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in the
drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons; but there is
a perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin of her
drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run riot
in, where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to read her
thoughts. This book of hers I mean to see, if I can get at it honorably.

I have never yet crossed the threshold of the little gentleman's
chamber. How he lives, when he once gets within it, I can only guess.
His hours are late, as I have said; often, on waking late in the night,
I see the light through cracks in his window-shutters on the wall of the
house opposite. If the times of witchcraft were not over, I should be
afraid to be so close a neighbor to a place from which there come such
strange noises. Sometimes it is the dragging of something heavy over the
floor, that makes me shiver to hear it,--it sounds so like what people
that kill other people have to do now and then. Occasionally I hear very
sweet strains of music,--whether of a wind or stringed instrument, or a
human voice, strange as it may seem, I have often tried to find out, but
through the partition I could not be quite sure. If I have not heard
a wom