re
a mere fortune-hunter. Show the world the blushing peasant-girl you have
made your wife, and say, "Yes, I have had courage to do this." Or else
strive for a princess,--a Russian princess. Better, far better, however,
the humble-hearted child of nature and the fields, the simple, trusting,
confiding girl, who, regarding her lover as a sort of demi-god, would,
while she clung to him--

"You press me so hard!" murmured Catinka, half rebukingly, but with a
sort of pouting expression that became her marvellously.

"I was thinking of something that interested me, dearest," said I; but I
'm not sure that I made my meaning very clear to her, and yet there was
a roguish look in her black eye that puzzled me greatly. I began to
like her, or, if you prefer the phrase, to fall in love with her. I knew
it--I felt it just the way that a man who has once had the ague never
mistakes when he is going to have a return of the fever. In the same way
exactly, did I recognize all the premonitory symptoms,--the giddiness,
the shivering, increased action of the heart--Halt, Potts! and reflect a
bit; are you describing love, or a tertian?

How will the biographer conduct himself here? Whether will he have to
say, "Potts resisted manfully this fatal attachment; had he yielded to
the seductions of this early passion, it is more than probable we would
never have seen him this, that, and t' other, nor would the world have
been enriched with--Heaven knows what;" or shall he record, "Potts loved
her, loved her as only such a nature as his ever loves! He felt keenly
that, in a mere worldly point of view, he must sacrifice; but it was
exactly in that love and that sacrifice was born the poet, the wondrous
child of song, who has given us the most glorious lyrics of our
language. He had the manliness to share his fortune with this poor
girl. * It was,' he tells us of himself, in one of those little touching
passages in his diary, which place him immeasurably above the mock
sentimentality of Jean Jacques,--'it was on the road to Constance, of
a bright and breezy summer morning, that I told her of my love. We were
walking along, our arms around each other, as might two happy, guileless
children. I was very young in what is called the world, but I had a
boundless confidence in myself; my theory was, "If I be strengthened
by the deep devotion of one loving heart, I have no fears of failure."'
Beautiful words, and worthy of all memory! And then he goes o