Home-sickness had marked me for its own one day.  I sat alone in my rude little office, conning over again for the hundredth time strange chapters of a waif’s experience,—­reproducing auld-lang-syne, with all its thronged streets and lonely forest-paths, its old familiar faces, talks, and songs,—­ingathering there, in the name of Love or Friendship, forms that were dim and voices that were echoes; and many an “alas,” and “too late,” and “it might have been,” they brought along with them.

  “Let this remembrance comfort me,—­that when
  My heart seemed bursting,—­like a restless wave
  That, swollen with fearful longing for the shore,
  Throws its strong life on the imagined bliss
  Of finding peace and undisturbed calm,—­
  It fell on rocks and broke in many tears.

  “Else could I bear, on all days of the year,—­
  Not now alone, this gentle summer night,
  When scythes are busy in the headed grass,
  And the full moon warms me to thoughtfulness,—­
  This voice that haunts the desert of my soul: 
  ‘It might have been!’ Alas!  ‘It might have been!’”

I drew from my battered, weather-beaten sea-box sad store of old letters, bethumbed and soiled,—­an accusation in every one of them, and small hope of forgiveness, save what the gentle dead might render.  There were pretty little portraits, too.—­Ah, well!  I put them back, —­a frown, or a shadow of reproachful sadness, on the picture of a once loving and approving face is the hardest bitterness to bide, the self-unsparing wanderer can know.  Therefore I would fain let these faces be turned from me,—­all save one, a merry minx of maidenhood, of careless heart, and laughing lips, and somewhat naughty eyes.  It was a steel engraving, not of the finest, torn from some Book of Beauty, or other silly-sentimental keepsake of the literary catch-penny class, brought all the way from home, and tenderly saved for the sake of its strange by-chance resemblance to a smart little lionne I had known in Virginia, in the days when smart little lionnes made me a sort of puppy Cumming.  The picture, unframed, and exposed to all the chances of rough travel, had partaken of my share of foul weather and coarse handling, and been spotted and smutched, and creased and torn, and every way defaced.  I had often wished that I might have a pretty painting made from it, before it should be spoiled past copying.  So here, I thought, shall be my introduction to my fly-in-amber artist, of the seedy tent and the romantic miniatures.  So pocketing my picture, I hied me forthwith to Dupont Street.

The tent seemed quite deserted.  At first, I feared my rare bird had flitted; I shook the bit of flying-jib that answered for a door, and called to any one within, more than once, before an inmate stirred.  Then, so quietly that I had not heard his approach, a lad, of ten perhaps, came to the entrance, and, timidly peering up into my face, asked, “Is it my father you wish to see, Sir?”