convexity are fostered, as behind a lens, the glowing tendencies of my
youth. Though no longer, like the Harold described in Icelandic verse
by Regner Hairy-Breeches, "a young chief proud of my flowing locks,"
yet I still "spend my mornings among the young maidens," or such of
them as frequent the American Colony, as we call it, in Paris. I still
"love to converse with the handsome widows." Miss Ashburton, who
in one little passage of our youth treated me with considerable
disrespect, and who afterward married a person of great lingual
accomplishments, her father's late courier, at Naples, has been
handsomely forgiven, but not forgotten. A few intelligent ladies,
of marked listening powers and conspicuous accomplishments, are
habitually met by me at their residences in the neighborhood of the
Arc de Triomphe or at the receptions of the United States minister.
These fair attractions, although occupying, in practice, a
preponderating share of my time, are as nothing to me, however, in
comparison with that enticing illusion, my Book.

[Illustration]

The scientific use of the imagination in treating the places and
distances of Geography is the dream of my days and the insomnia of my
nights.

Every morning I take down and dust the loose sheets of my coming book
or polish the gilding of my former one. It is in my fidelity to these
baffling hopes--hopes fed with so many withered (or at least torn and
blotted) leaves--rather than in any resemblance authenticable by a
looking-glass, that I show my identity with the old long-haired and
nasal Flemming.