transparent animalcule. The hard thing of it is that ghosts are
chained to the same scenes that chained their bodies, and when they
sleep-walk, so to speak, it must be through phases of former
existence. What a nightmare for them to go over once again the lived
and done, the suffered and finished! What a comfort to wake up and
find one's self dead, well dead!

I could have continued and put the whole opera troupe in "costume de
ghost," but I think it was the woman's eyes that drew me back to her
face and her story. She had a sensible face, now that I observed her
naturally, as it were; and her hands,--how I have agonized over those
hands on the stage!--all knuckles and exaggerated veins, clutching her
dress as she sang, or, petrified, outstretched to _Leonore's_ "Pourquoi
ces larmes?"--her hands were the hands of an honest, hard-working
woman who buckrams her own skirts, and at need could scrub her own
floor. Her face (my description following my wandering glance)--her
face was careworn, almost to desuetude; not dissipation-worn, as,
alas! the faces of the more gifted ladies of opera troupes too often
are. There was no fattening in it of pastry, truffles, and bonbons;
upon it none of the tracery left by nightly champagne tides and
ripples; and consequently her figure, under her plain dress, had not
that for display which the world has conventioned to call charms.
Where a window-cord would hardly have sufficed to girdle _Leonore_, a
necklace would have served her. She had not beauty enough to fear the
flattering dangers of masculine snares and temptations,--or there may
have been other reasons,--but as a wife--there was something about her
that guaranteed it--she would have blossomed love and children as a
fig-tree does figs.

In truth, she was just talking about children. The first part of her