head was swimming with confused apprehension, my eyes must have
glared. Preciosa was frightened, and rising from her seat, stood with
an inquiring glance of surprise in her eyes. But I was bent with
frenzy upon my purpose. I was merely aware that she was in the room. I
saw nothing else. I heard nothing. I cared for nothing, but to see her
through that magic glass, and feel at once, all the fulness of
blissful perfection which that would reveal. Preciosa stood before the
mirror, but alarmed at my wild and eager movements, unable to
distinguish what I had in my hands, and seeing me raise them suddenly
to my face, she shrieked with terror, and fell fainting upon the
floor, at the very moment that I placed the glasses before my eyes,
and beheld--myself, reflected in the mirror, before which she had been
standing.

"Dear madam," cried Titbottom, to my wife, springing up and falling
back again in his chair, pale and trembling, while Prue ran to him and
took his hand, and I poured out a glass of water--"I saw myself."

There was silence for many minutes. Prue laid her hand gently upon the
head of our guest, whose eyes were closed, and who breathed softly,
like an infant in sleeping. Perhaps, in all the long years of anguish
since that hour, no tender hand had touched his brow, nor wiped away
the damps of a bitter sorrow. Perhaps the tender, maternal fingers of
my wife soothed his weary head with the conviction that he felt the
hand of his mother playing with the long hair of her boy in the soft
West Indian morning. Perhaps it was only the natural relief of
expressing a pent-up sorrow. When he spoke again, it was with the old,
subdued tone, and the air of quaint solemnity.

"These things were matters of long, long ago, and I came to this