trying to make something of my description.  If there is here and there one that can make anything intelligible out of my talk about the Great Secret, and who has spelt out a syllable or two of it on some woman’s face, dead or living, that is all I can expect.  One should see the person with whom he converses about such matters.  There are dreamy-eyed people to whom I should say all these things with a certainty of being understood;—­

          That moment that his face I see,
          I know the man that must hear me
          To him my tale I teach.

—­I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar for this August number, so that they will never see it.

—­Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious attempt, which may go for nothing, and you can have your money refunded, if you will make the change.

This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our breakfast-table.  The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she again seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards him.  That slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity towards each other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they sit side by side, is a physical fact I have often noticed.  Then there is a tendency in all the men’s eyes to converge on her; and I do firmly believe, that, if all their chairs were examined, they would be found a little obliquely placed, so as to favor the direction in which their occupants love to look.

That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting opposite to me, is no exception to the rule.  She brought down some mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber.  She gave a sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and sent another by the hand of Bridget to this old gentleman.

—­Sarvant, Ma’am I Much obleeged,—­he said, and put it gallantly in his button-hole.—­After breakfast he must see some of her drawings.  Very fine performances,—­very fine!—­truly elegant productions, truly elegant!—­Had seen Miss Linwood’s needlework in London, in the year (eighteen hundred and little or nothing, I think he said,)—­patronized by the nobility and gentry, and Her Majesty,—­elegant, truly elegant productions, very fine performances; these drawings reminded him of them;—­wonderful resemblance to Nature; an extraordinary art, painting; Mr. Copley made some very fine pictures that he remembered seeing when he was a boy.  Used to remember some lines about a portrait Written by Mr. Cowper, beginning,

         “Oh that those lips had language!  Life has pass’d
          With me but roughly since I heard thee last.”