d up in the keenest spasms and
flattened out in the laxest languors of this breathing-sickness, which
keeps certain parcels of matter uneasy for three or four score
years,--to have fought all the devils and clasped all the angels of
its delirium,--and then, just at the point when the white-hot passions
have cooled down to cherry-red, plunge our experience into the
ice-cold stream of some human language or other, one might think would
end in a rhapsody with something of spring and temper in it. All this
I thought my power and province.

The schoolmistress had tried life, too. Once in a while one meets with
a single soul greater than all the living pageant that passes before
it. As the pale astronomer sits in his study with sunken eyes and thin
fingers, and weighs Uranus or Neptune as in a balance, so there are
meek, slight women who have weighed all that this planetary life can
offer, and hold it like a bauble in the palm of their slender hands.
This was one of them. Fortune had left her, sorrow had baptized her;
the routine of labor and the loneliness of almost friendless city-life
were before her. Yet, as I looked upon her tranquil face, gradually
regaining a cheerfulness that was often sprightly, as she became
interested in the various matters we talked about and places we
visited, I saw that eye and lip and every shifting lineament were made
for love,--unconscious of their sweet office as yet, and meeting the
cold aspect of Duty with the natural graces which were meant for the
reward of nothing less than the Great Passion.

----I never spoke one word of love to the schoolmistress in the course
of these pleasant walks. It seemed to me that we talked of everything
but love on that particular morning. There was, perhaps, a little more
timidity and hesitancy on my part than I have commonly shown among our
people at the boarding-house. In fact, I considered myself the master
at the breakfast-table; but, somehow, I could not command myself just
then so well as usual. The truth is, I had secured a passage to
Liverpool in the steamer which was to leave at noon,--with the
condition, however, of being released in case circumstances occurred
to detain me. The schoolmistress knew nothing about all this, of
course, as yet.

It was on the Common that we were walking. The _mall_, or boulevard of
our Common, you know, has various branches leading from it in
different directions. One of these runs downward from opposite Joy
Stree