friendship gave me admission into some of the most agreeable French
families of that _quasi_ Parisian city, and in the reception of
their hospitality I soon lost the feeling of isolation which attends a
stranger in a crowded mart. My life at that time was without shadows. I
had health, friends, education, position,--youth, as well, which then
seemed a blessing, though I would not now exchange for it my crown of
years and experience. Fortune only I then had not; and because I had it
not, I am telling you, to-night, this story.

"It chanced, one day, that I was invited to dine at the house of an
aristocratic subject of the old French _regime_. I did not know
the family, and a previous engagement tempted me to decline the
invitation; but one of those mysterious impulses which are in fact the
messengers of Destiny compelled me to go, and I went. Thus slight may
be the thread which changes the entire web of the future! After
greeting my host, and the party assembled in the drawing-room, my
attention was arrested by a portrait suspended in a recess, and partly
veiled by purple curtains, like Isis within her shrine. The lovely,
living eyes beamed upon me out of the shrine, radiant with an internal
light I had never before seen on canvas. The features were harmonious,
the complexion pure and clear, and the whole picture wore an air of
graceful, gentle girlhood, glowing, like Undine, with the flush of 'the
coming soul.' I hardly knew whether the face was strictly beautiful
according to the canons of Art; for only a Shakspeare can be at the
same time critical and sympathetic, and my criticism was baffled and
blinded by the fascination of those wondrous eyes. They reminded me of
what a materialist said of the portraits of Prudhon,--that they were
enough to make one believe in the immortality of the soul. Life
multiplied by feeling into a limitless dream of past and future was
mirrored in their clear depths; the questful gaze seemed reading the