The Little Gentleman is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement of having such a charming neighbor next him.  I judge so mainly by his silence and by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if he were thinking of something that had happened, or that might happen, or that ought to happen,—­or how beautiful her young life looked, or how hardly Nature had dealt with him, or something which struck him silent, at any rate.  I made several conversational openings for him, but he did not fire up as he often does.  I even went so far as to indulge in, a fling at the State House, which, as we all know, is in truth a very imposing structure, covering less ground than St. Peter’s, but of similar general effect.  The little man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt.  He said to the young lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he reddened a little,—­so I thought.  I don’t think it right to watch persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,—­but we all do it.

I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of the table, to make room for another newcomer of the lady sort.  A well-mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a cap, —­pretty wide in the parting, though,—­contours vaguely hinted, —­features very quiet,—­says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye on the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her My record is a blank for some days after this.  In the mean time I have contrived to make out the person and the story of our young lady, who, according to appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine for a boarding-house romance before a year is out.  It is very curious that she should prove connected with a person many of us have heard of.  Yet, curious as it is, I have been a hundred times struck with the circumstance that the most remote facts are constantly striking each other; just as vessels starting from ports thousands of miles apart pass close to each other in the naked breadth of the ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a crack of timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,—­a cry mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some Gloucester fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls the name of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her lonely pillow,—­a widow.

Oh, these mysterious meetings!  Leaving all the vague, waste, endless spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed for them in the waters from the beginning of creation!  Not only things and events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these surprises, that, if there were a reader in my parish who did not recognize the familiar occurrence of what I am now going to mention, I should think it a case for the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of Intelligence among the Comfortable