Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all that I have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come?  Listen, then.  The number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences in the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in the world of outward events, of which the presence of the young girl now at our table, and proving to be the daughter of an old acquaintance some of us may remember, is the special example which led me through this labyrinth of reflections, and finally lands me at the commencement of this young girl’s story, which, as I said, I have found the time and felt the interest to learn something of, and which I think I can tell without wronging the unconscious subject of my brief delineation.

* * * * *

IRIS.

You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd poem written by an old Latin tutor?  He brought up at the verb amo, I love, as all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living dictionary for him at the word filia, a daughter.  The poor man was greatly perplexed in choosing a name for her. Lucretia and Virginia were the first that he thought of; but then came up those pictured stories of Titus Livius, which he could never read without crying, though he had read them a hundred times.

—­Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber.  To them her wrongs briefly.  Let them see to the wretch, she will take care of herself.  Then the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart.  She slides from her seat, and falls dying.  “Her husband and her father cry aloud.”—­No,—­not Lucretia.

—­Virginius,—­a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl.  She engaged to a very promising young man.  Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy to her,—­must have her at any rate.  Hires a lawyer to present the arguments in favor of the view that she was another man’s daughter.

There used to be lawyers in Rome that would do such things.—­All right.  There are two sides to everything. Audi alteram partem.  The legal gentleman has no opinion,—­he only states the evidence.—­A doubtful case.  Let the young lady be under the protection of the Honorable Decemvir until it can be looked up thoroughly.—­Father thinks it best, on the whole, to give in.  Will explain the matter, if the young lady and her maid will step this way. That is the explanation,—­a stab with a butcher’s knife, snatched from a stall, meant for other lambs than this poor bleeding Virginia!