The sun was filling the east with golden filaments, and the sparrows were making the air melodious with their songs, glad, no doubt, at the major’s return, when, on the morning following the events I have recorded in the foregoing chapter, I was awakened by a voice singing sweetly under my window.  I soon recognized it as the voice of Bessie, whose image rose up in my fancy as the fairest of living creatures.  At first, my senses seemed seized with a pleasant delirium; but soon the strains came so sweet and tender that I lost all power over my emotions, while it seemed to me as if my fancy had winged its way to some land where love and joy rules unclouded.  “O, sweet transport, whither wilt thou beguile me!” I said with a sigh, as the voice ceased its singing, and the effect was like an electric shock, consuming me with disappointment.  But I heard the dulcet echoes mingling faintly with the songs of birds, as if some seraph had strung her lute to give sweet music to the winds; and I was consoled.

After a few moments’ pause the voice again broke forth from the garden, and I caught the following words, which, if I can trust my treacherous memory, belong to a song written by the learned Dr. Easley when in the tutelage of his literary career, and heaven knows, (for he was then a priest of slender means,) before he ever thought of translating German or becoming the pensioned puffer of three New York booksellers:  “Come, gentle stranger, haste thee hither, Tarry not, for I am lonely—­Come and tell me whom thou lovest Or the throbbing mischief will my heart betray.”  This being a fair and honest specimen of Easley’s early attempts at versification, it was said of him by those best qualified to judge, that had he but stuck to the pulpit and sonnet writing, he would in time have become an adept, for he could compose pathetically enough, and so regulate his points as to make his theology appear quite profound.  But he had a weakness which ran to the getting of gold, and this betrayed him into the commerce of literature, where he had become a critic of easy virtue, and had attracted about him innumerable adorers, principally maidens of twenty, whose elegant endowments and clever novels he could not sufficiently extol.  Besides being a poet and a great praiser of small books, the learned doctor had a rare talent for making ladies’ slippers, which, it had been more than once hinted, was the trade of his early youth.  It was now charged upon him, though I do not assert it of my own knowledge, that he had found it profitable to become the assassin of criticism and the undertaker of literature, for which offices he was amply qualified, notwithstanding the very serious writers in Putnam’s Magazine thought he ought to be transported to Sandy Hook, there to do penance among the breakers a whole November.  And this punishment they would no doubt have carried out, but for the two newspapers and four booksellers, who stood in so much need of his virgin goodness that they refused to part with him even for a day.