“Yes, my brother, by our grand-parents.  They told him it should be so.  Ah! there are no distinctions in the grave; white skin and black skin alike return to dust, and the marl of the earth is composed alike of the bones of all races, and their properties seem to be the same.  I, too, wish to sleep there.  It is a romantically beautiful spot, and its grand old traditions make it holy ground.  How its associations hallow it!  Imagination peoples it with those bold old red men who assembled in the temple to worship the holy fire—­emblematic of their faith—­humbling their fierce natures and supplicating for mercy.  I go there and I feel in the touch of the air that it is peopled with the spirits of the mighty dead, surrounding and blessing me for my memory of, and love for, their extinct race.”

“Bravo, sister!  What an enthusiast!  You, sir, have some knowledge of the Indians.  Do they stir the romance of your nature as that of my baby sister?”

The glance from her eye was full of scorn:  it flashed with almost malignant hate as she rose from her seat, and taking the arm of her cousin she swept from the room, audibly whispering “baby sister” in sneering accents.

“Woman’s nature is a strange study, my young friend.  I have several sisters and they are all strange, each in her peculiar way.  They are remarkable for the love they bear their husbands, and yet they all have a pleasure in tormenting them, and are never so unhappy, as when they see these happy.  This younger sister has a nature all her own.  I do not think she shares a trait with another living being.  Wild, yet gentle; the eagle to some, to some the dove.  Quick as the lightning in her temper—­as fervid, too; a heart to hate intensely, and yet to melt in love and worship its object; but would slay it, if she felt it had deceived her.  Always searching into the history of the past, and always careless of the future.”

“You have drawn something of the character of a Spanish woman.  Their love and their hate is equally fierce; and both easily excited, they are devoted in all their passions.  I have thought that this grew from the secluded life they live.  Ardency is natural to the race, and this restrained makes their lives one long romance.  Their world is all of imagination.  The contacts of real life they never meet outside of their prison-homes, and the influence of experience is never known.  They are seen through bars, are sought through bars, they love through bars—­and the struggle is, to escape from these restraints; and the moral of the act or means for its accomplishment, or the object to be attained, never enters the mind.  Such natures properly reared to know the world, to see it, hear it, and suffer it, tunes all the attributes of the mind and heart to make sweet music.  Nothing mellows the heart like sorrow; nothing so softens the obduracy of our natures as experience.  None, sir, man or woman, are fitted for the world without the experiences