Sweet sister!  Iris, who shall never name thee,
     Trembling for fear her open heart may shame thee,
     Speaks from this vision-haunted page to claim thee.

     Spare her, I pray thee!  If the maid is sleeping,
     Peace with her! she has had her hour of weeping. 
     No more!  She leaves her memory in thy keeping.

These verses were written in the first leaves of the locked volume.  As I turned the pages, I hesitated for a moment.  Is it quite fair to take advantage of a generous, trusting impulse to read the unsunned depths of a young girl’s nature, which I can look through, as the balloon-voyagers tell us they see from their hanging-baskets through the translucent waters which the keenest eye of such as sail over them in ships might strive to pierce in vain?  Why has the child trusted me with such artless confessions,—­self-revelations, which might be whispered by trembling lips, under the veil of twilight, in sacred confessionals, but which I cannot look at in the light of day without a feeling of wronging a sacred confidence?

To all this the answer seemed plain enough after a little thought.  She did not know how fearfully she had disclosed herself; she was too profoundly innocent.  Her soul was no more ashamed than the fair shapes that walked in Eden without a thought of over-liberal loveliness.  Having nobody to tell her story to,—­having, as she said in her verses, no musical instrument to laugh and cry with her,—­nothing, in short, but the language of pen and pencil,—­all the veinings of her nature were impressed on these pages as those of a fresh leaf are transferred to the blank sheets which inclose it.  It was the same thing which I remember seeing beautifully shown in a child of some four or five years we had one day at our boarding-house.  The child was a deaf mute.  But its soul had the inner sense that answers to hearing, and the shaping capacity which through natural organs realizes itself in words.  Only it had to talk with its face alone; and such speaking eyes, such rapid alternations of feeling and shifting expressions of thought as flitted over its face, I have never seen in any other human countenance.

I wonder if something of spiritual transparency is not typified in the golden-blonde organization.  There are a great many little creatures,—­many small fishes, for instance,—­which are literally transparent, with the exception of some of the internal organs.  The heart can be seen beating as if in a case of clouded crystal.  The central nervous column with its sheath runs as a dark stripe through the whole length of the diaphanous muscles of the body.  Other little creatures are so darkened with pigment that we can see only their surface.  Conspirators and poisoners are painted with black, beady-eyes and swarthy hue; Judas, in Leonardo’s picture, is the model of them all.