May I beg of you who have begun this paper nobly trusting to your own imagination and sensibilities to give it the significance which it does not lay claim to without your kind assistance,—­may I beg of you, I say, to pay particular attention to the brackets which enclose certain paragraphs?  I want my “asides,” you see, to whisper loud to you who read my notes, and sometimes I talk a page or two to you without pretending that I said a word of it to our boarders.  You will find a very long “aside” to you almost as soon as you begin to read.  And so, dear young friend, fall to at once, taking such things as I have provided for you; and if you turn them, by the aid of your powerful imagination, into a fair banquet, why, then, peace be with you, and a summer by the still waters of some quiet river, or by some yellow beach, where, as my friend the Professor, says, you can sit with Nature’s wrist in your hand and count her ocean-pulses.]

I should like to make a few intimate revelations relating especially to my early life, if I thought you would like to hear them.

[The schoolmistress turned a little in her chair, and sat with her face directed partly towards me.—­Half-mourning now;—­purple ribbon.  That breastpin she wears has gray hair in it; her mother’s, no doubt;—­I remember our landlady’s daughter telling me, soon after the schoolmistress came to board with us, that she had lately “buried a payrent.”  That’s what made her look so pale, —­kept the poor dying thing alive with her own blood.  Ah! long illness is the real vampyrism; think of living a year or two after one is dead, by sucking the life-blood out of a frail young creature at one’s bedside!  Well, souls grow white, as well as cheeks, in these holy duties one that goes in a nurse may come out an angel.—­God bless all good women!—­to their soft hands and pitying hearts we must all come at last!—­The schoolmistress has a better color than when she came.—­Too late!  “It might have been.”  —­Amen!—­How many thoughts go to a dozen heart-beats, sometimes!  There was no long pause after my remark addressed to the company, but in that time I had the train of ideas and feelings I have just given flash through my consciousness sudden and sharp as the crooked red streak that springs out of its black sheath like the creese of a Malay in his death-race, and stabs the earth right and left in its blind rage.

I don’t deny that there was a pang in it,—­yes, a stab; but there was a prayer, too,—­the “Amen” belonged to that.—­Also, a vision of a four-story brick house, nicely furnished,—­I actually saw many specific articles,—­curtains, sofas, tables, and others, and could draw the patterns of them at this moment,—­a brick house, I say, looking out on the water, with a fair parlor, and books and busts and pots of flowers and bird-cages, all complete; and at the window, looking on the water, two of us.—­“Male and female created He them.”—­These two were standing at the window, when a smaller shape that was playing near them looked up at me with such a look that I——­poured out a glass of water, drank it all down, and then continued.]