There is one other thing that might happen.  If the interest he awakes in her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in it, she will glance off from him into some great passion or other.  All excitements run to love in women of a certain—­let us not say age, but youth.  An electrical current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a bar of iron lying within it, but not touching it.  So a woman is turned into a love-magnet by a tingling current of life running round her.  I should like to see one of them balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch if she did not turn so as to point north and south,—­as she would, if the love-currents are like those of the earth our mother.

Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth’s “Boy of Windermere”?  This boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud, mimicking the hooting of the owls, who would answer him

               “with quivering peals,
     And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
     Redoubled and redoubled.”

When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far distant waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint itself with new force upon his perceptions.—­Read the sonnet, if you please;—­it is Wordsworth all over,—­trivial in subject, solemn in style, vivid in description, prolix in detail, true metaphysically, but immensely suggestive of “imagination,” to use a mild term, when related as an actual fact of a sprightly youngster.  All I want of it is to enforce the principle, that, when the door of the soul is once opened to a guest, there is no knowing who will come in next.

—­Our young girl keeps up her early habit of sketching heads and characters.  Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in the drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons, but there is a perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin of her drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run riot in, where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to read her thoughts.  This book of hers I mean to see, if I can get at it honorably.

I have never yet crossed the threshold of the Little Gentleman’s chamber.  How he lives, when he once gets within it, I can only guess.  His hours are late, as I have said; often, on waking late in the night, I see the light through cracks in his window-shutters on the wall of the house opposite.  If the times of witchcraft were not over, I should be afraid to be so close a neighbor to a place from which there come such strange noises.  Sometimes it is the dragging of something heavy over the floor, that makes me shiver to hear it,—­it sounds so like what people that kill other people have to do now and then.  Occasionally I hear very sweet strains of music,—­whether of a wind or stringed instrument, or a human voice, strange as it may seem, I have often tried to find out, but through the partition