The world is full of magicians, transformations, magnetic miracles, juggling, chemical astonishments, moral gymnastics, hypocrisies, lies of wonder,—­but what is so strange, so marvellous, so inexplicable, as the power of conventions?  One minute found me tempting the blackness of darkness, every idea astray and reeling, every emotion benumbed; the next, a bell rang, and I went to the tea-table, sat in my own place, answered my mother’s questions, resumed the politenesses and habits of daily life, seemed to be myself to those who had known me always,—­ate, drank, jested,—­was a man,—­no more the trodden ashes under a girl’s foot, no longer the sport of a girl’s cool eye, no slave, no writhing idolater under the car-wheel; and this lasted-half an hour!  You have seen the horses of Pharaoh following the glittering sand-track of the Judaean host, walled in with curling beryl battlements, over whose crests the white sea-foam dares no more laugh and threaten?  You know those curved necks clothed with strength, the bent head whose nostrils flare with pride, the tossed and waving mane, the magnificent grace of the nervous shoulder, the great, intelligent, expectant eyes?  Suddenly the roar of waves at the farther shore!  Look at that head! strong and quiet no more; terror erects the quivering ears; the nostril sinks and contracts with fear; the eye glares and glances from side to side, mad with prescient instinct; the corded veins that twist forkedly from the lip upward swell to the utmost tension of the fine skin; that sweeping mane rises in rough undulations, the forelock is tossed back, the shoulder grows rigid with horror, the chest rises with a long indrawn breath of dismay.  Horrible beyond all horrid sounds, the yell of a horse in mortal fear.  Do you hear it?  No,—­it is a picture,—­the picture of a moment between one animal that sees the impending fate, and another that has not yet caught it;—­it is human that such moments interpose between two oceans of agony, that man can momentarily control the rush of a sea which the brute must yield to.—­So the sea rushed back.

All night long, all the long night!—­long as lifetimes are, measured with slow-dropping arteries that drip away living blood.  Once I watched by a dying woman; wild October rains poured without, but all unheard; in the dim-lit room, scented with quaint odors of lackered cases and chests of camphor-wood, heavy with perfumes that failed to revive, and hushed with whispers of hopeless comment, that delicate frame and angelic face, which the innumerable lines of age could only exalt and sweeten, shivered with the frosts of death; every breath was a sob; every sigh, anguish; the terrible restlessness of the struggle between soul and body in their parting writhed in every limb;—­but there were no words other than broken cries of prayer, only half-heard on earth, till at length the tender, wistful eyes unclosed, and in a hoarse whisper, plaintive beyond expression, full of a desolate and immortal