was not of those who can concentrate and absorb the fulness of another
soul, wedding memory with immortal longing. Thus the problem of my
friend's life-long reserve continued to provoke curiosity until its
solution was granted to me alone, and, with it, the explanation of his
mesmeric entrancement on the occasion to which I have alluded. I repeat
the story because it is literally _true_, and because some of its
incidents may be classed among those psychological phenomena which form
the most occult, the most interesting, and the least understood of all
departments of human knowledge.

During a period of summer recreation I induced Vilalba to renew our
interrupted acquaintance by passing a month with me in my country
home. The moonlight of many years had blended its silver with his
still abundant locks, and the lines of thought were deepened in his
face, but I found him in other respects unchanged. He had the same
deep, metallic voice, so musical that to hear him say the slightest
things was a pleasure, the same graceful courtesy and happy elasticity
of temperament; and was full as ever of noble purposes, and the Roman
self-conviction of power to live them out. One of those nights that
"are not made for slumber" found us lingering beneath the odorous vines
which interlocked their gay blossoms around the slight columns of the
veranda, until even the gray surprise of dawn,--the "soft, guileless
consolations" of our cigars, as Aeschylus says of certain other
incense, the cool, fragrant breezes, gentle as remembered kisses upon
the brow, the tremulous tenderness of the star-beams, the listening
hush of midnight, having swayed us to a mood of pensiveness which found
a reflex in our conversation. From the warning glare of sunlight the
heart shuts close its secrets; but hours like these beguile from its
inmost depths those subtile emotions, and vague, dreamy, delicious
thoughts, which, like plants, waken to life only beneath the protecting