heaven and earth, apparently, ministered to his passion and made him
talk all around the beloved subject with a wealth of simile and
suggestion that she had never dreamed of. But, if he gave full
expression to his agitated feelings in these ways, he was extremely
delicate, respectful, reserved, in others. He wrapped up his heart in so
many napkins, indeed, that, being a practical woman not extraordinarily
gifted in the matter of imagination, she frequently lost sight of it
altogether, and she sometimes failed to follow him in a broad road of
sentiment that (like the Western ones which Longfellow has described)
narrowed and narrowed until it disappeared, a mere thread, up a tree. If
he looked long, after one of these flights, at her sweet English face to
see what impression he had made, he was often forced to see that it was
not the one he had meant to make at all.

"Is anything amiss?" she asked once, in her cool, level tone, fixing
upon him her sincerely honest eyes. "Are there blacks on my nose?"
Although she had distinctly refused him at Kalsing, as became a girl
destitute of vanity and coquetry and attached to some one else, she had
not found him the less fluent, omnipresent, persuasive, at Niagara. It
was diverting to see them seated side by side on Goat Island, he waving
his hand toward the blue sky, apostrophizing the water, the foliage, the
clouds, and what not, in prose and verse, quite content if he but got a
quiet glance and assenting word now and then, she listening demurely in
a state of protestant satisfaction, her fair hair very dazzling in the
sunshine, an unvarying apple-blossom tint in her calm face, her fingers
tatting industriously not to waste the time outright. It was very
agreeable in a way, she told herself, but something must really be done
to get rid of the man. And so, one morning when they chanced to be
alone, and he was being unusually ethereal and beautiful in his remarks,
telling her that, as Byron had said, she would be "the morning star of