life, without reason, of course; but he was always notional.  His love of literature was one of the rocks he foundered on.  He wasn’t successful; his best compositions were too delicate, fanciful, to please the popular taste; and then he was full of the radical and fanatical notions which infected so many people at that time in New England, and infect them now, for that matter; and his sublimated, impracticable ideas and principles, which he kept till his dying day, and which, I confess, alienated me from him, always staved off his chances of success.  Consequently, he never rose above the drudgery of some employment on newspapers.  Then he was terribly passionate, not without cause, I allow; but it wasn’t wise.  What I mean is this:  if he saw, or if he fancied he saw, any wrong or injury done to any one, it was enough to throw him into a frenzy; he would get black in the face and absolutely shriek out his denunciations of the wrong-doer.  I do believe he would have visited his own brother with the most unsparing invective, if that brother had laid a harming finger on a street-beggar, or a colored man, or a poor person of any kind.  I don’t blame the feeling; though with a man like him it was very apt to be a false or mistaken one; but, at any rate, its exhibition wasn’t sensible.  Well, as I was saying, he buffeted about in this world a long time, poorly paid, fed, and clad; taking more care of other people than he did of himself.  Then mental suffering, physical exposure, and want killed him.”

The stern voice had grown softer than a child’s.  The same look of unutterable tenderness brooded on the mournful face of the phantom by his side; but its thin, shining hand was laid upon his head, and its countenance had undergone a change.  The form was still undefined; but the features had become distinct.  They were those of a young man, beautiful and wan, and marked with great suffering.

A pause had fallen on the conversation, in which the father and daughter heard the solemn sighing of the wintry wind around the dwelling.  The silence seemed scarcely broken by the voice of the young girl.

“Dear father, this was very sad.  Did you say he died of want?”

“Of want, my child, of hunger and cold.  I don’t doubt it.  He had wandered about, as I gather, houseless for a couple of days and nights.  It was in December, too.  Some one found him, on a rainy night, lying in the street, drenched and burning with fever, and had him taken to the hospital.  It appears that he had always cherished a strange affection for me, though I had grown away from him; and in his wild ravings he constantly mentioned my name, and they sent for me.  That was our first meeting after two years.  I found him in the hospital—­dying.  Heaven can witness that I felt all my old love for him return then, but he was delirious, and never recognized me.  And, Nathalie, his hair,—­it had been coal-black, and he wore it very long,—­he wouldn’t let them cut it either; and as they knew no skill could save him, they let him have his way,—­his hair was then as white as snow!  God alone knows what that brain must have suffered to blanch hair which had been as black as the wing of a raven!”