involuntary feeling that she was born to die in some tragic way. She
reminds one of those perilously fragile vases we feel must get broken,
those rarely delicate flowers we feel cannot have strong healthy roots.

She is one of those who seem born to see terrible things, monstrous
accidents, supernatural appearances. She has seen death and birth in
strange uncanny forms; and she has met with unearthly creatures in the
lonely corners of rooms. She is a 'seventh-month child,' and
'seventh-month children always see things,' she says, with a funny little
sententious shake of her head.

Yet, with all this, she is the sunniest, healthiest, most domestic little
soul that breathes; and no doubt the materialist would be right in saying
that all this 'spirituelle' nonsense is but a trick of her transparent
blonde complexion, a chance quality in the colour of her great luminous
eyes.

Like all women, she was most wonderful just before the birth of her first
child, a little changeling creature, wild-eyed as her fairy mother. How
she made believe with the little fairy vestments, the elfin-shirts, the
pixy-frocks--long before it was time for the tiny body to step inside
them! how she talked to the unborn soul that none but she as yet could
see! And all the time she 'knew' she was going to die, that she would
never see the little immortal that was about to put on our mortality:
'people' had told her so in her dreams at night,--doubtless 'the good
people,' the fairies. Those who loved her grew almost to believe her--she
looks so like a little Sibyl when she says such things,--yet her little
one came almost without a cry, and in a few days the fairy mother was once
more glinting about the house like a sunbeam.

Well! well! I cannot make you see her as I know her: that I fear is
certain. You might meet her, yet never know her from my description. If
you wait for the coarse articulation of words you might well 'miss' her;
for her qualities are not histrionic, they have no notion of making the
best of themselves. They remain, so to speak, in nuggets; they are minted
into no current coin of fleeting fashion and shallow accomplishment. But
if a face can mean more to you than the whole of Johnson's _Dictionary_,
and the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ to boot, if a strain of music can convey
to you the thrill of human life, with its heights and depths and romantic
issues and possibilities, as Gibbon and Grote can never do--come and
worship Whit