answering curves in their bowed necks, as if they had snake’s blood under their white feathers; and grave, high-shouldered herons standing on one foot like cripples, and looking at life round them with the cold stare of monumental effigies.—­A very odd page indeed!  Not a creature in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a mean figure to look at.  You can make your own comment; I am fanciful, you know.  I believe she is trying to idealize what we vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light of one of Nature’s eccentric curves, belonging to her system of beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections, though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like the circle and ellipse.  At any rate, I cannot help referring this paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in her head connected with her friend whom Nature has warped in the moulding.—­That is nothing to another transcendental fancy of mine.  I believe her soul thinks itself in his little crooked body at times,—­if it does not really get freed or half freed from her own.  Did you ever see a case of catalepsy?  You know what I mean,—­transient loss of sense, will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position in which they are put, as if they belonged to a lay-figure.  She had been talking with him and listening to him one day when the boarders moved from the table nearly all at once.  But she sat as before, her cheek resting on her hand, her amber eyes wide open and still.  I went to her, she was breathing as usual, and her heart was beating naturally enough,—­but she did not answer.  I bent her arm; it was as plastic as softened wax, and kept the place I gave it.—­This will never do, though, and I sprinkled a few drops of water on her forehead.  She started and looked round.—­I have been in a dream,—­she said;—­I feel as if all my strength were in this arm;—­give me your hand!—­She took my right hand in her left, which looked soft and white enough, but—­Good Heaven!  I believe she will crack my bones!  All the nervous power in her body must have flashed through those muscles; as when a crazy lady snaps her iron window-bars,—­she who could hardly glove herself when in her common health.  Iris turned pale, and the tears came to her eyes;—­she saw she had given pain.  Then she trembled, and might have fallen but for me;—­the poor little soul had been in one of those trances that belong to the spiritual pathology of higher natures, mostly those of women.

To come back to this wondrous book of Iris.  Two pages faced each other which I took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind.  On the left hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked with a single bird.  No trace of earth, but still the winged creature seemed to be soaring upward and upward.  Facing it, one of those black dungeons such as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured.  I am sure she must have seen those awful prisons of