ir, noble, and expansive,
at each side of which masses of dark-brown hair waved half in ringlets,
half in loose falling bands, shadowing her pale and downy cheek, where one
faint rosebud tinge seemed lingering; lips slightly parted, as though to
speak, gave to the features all the play of animation which completed this
intellectual character, and made up--"

"What I should say was a devilish pretty girl," interrupted Power.

"Back the widow against her at long odds, any day," murmured the adjutant.

"She was an angel! an angel!" cried Sparks with enthusiasm.

"So was the widow, if you go to that," said the adjutant, hastily.

"And so is Matilda Dalrymple," said Power, with a sly look at me. "We are
all honorable men; eh, Charley?"

"Go ahead with the story," said the skipper; "I'm beginning to feel an
interest in it."

"'Isabella,' said a man's voice, as a large, well-dressed personage
assisted her to alight,--'Isabella, love, you must take a little rest here
before we proceed farther.'

"'I think she had better, sir,' said a matronly-looking woman, with a plaid
cloak and a black bonnet.

"They disappeared within the house, and I was left alone. The bright dream
was past: she was there no longer; but in my heart her image lived, and I
almost felt she was before me. I thought I heard her voice, I saw her move;
my limbs trembled; my hands tingled; I rang the bell, ordered my trunks
back again to No. 5, and as I sank upon the sofa, murmured to myself, 'This
is indeed love at first sight.'"

"How devilish sudden it was," said the skipper.

"Exactly like camp fever," responded the doctor. "One moment ye are vara
well; the next ye are seized wi' a kind of shivering; then comes a kind of
mandering, dandering, travelling a'overness."

"D---- the camp fever," interrupted Power.

"Well, as I observed, I fell in love; and here let me take the opportunity
of observing that all that we are in the habit of hearing about single or
only attachments is mere nonsense. No man is so capable of feeling deeply
as he who is in the daily practice of it. Love, like everything else in
this world, demands a species of cultivation. The mere tyro in an affair of
the heart thinks he has exhausted all its pleasures and pains; but only
he who has made it his daily study for years, familiarizing his mind with
every phase of the passion, can properly or adequately appreciate it. Thus,
the more you love, the better you love; the more freque