purple. I never saw a full-blooded saint or sinner in my life.
The coldest villain I ever knew was the only son of his mother,
and she a widow,--and a kinder son never lived. Doubtless there
are people capable of a love terrible in its strength; but I
never knew such a case that some one did not consider its
expediency as "a match" in the light of dollars and cents. As
for heroines, of course I have seen beautiful women, and good as
fair. The most beautiful is delicate and pure enough for a type
of the Madonna, and has a heart almost as warm and holy. (Very
pure blood is in her veins, too, if you care about blood.) But at
home they call her Tode for a nickname; all we can do, she will
sing, and sing through her nose; and on washing-days she often
cooks the dinner, and scolds wholesomely, if the tea-napkins are
not in order. Now, what is anybody to do with a heroine like
that? I have known old maids in abundance, with pathos and
sunshine in their lives; but the old maid of novels I never have
met, who abandoned her soul to gossip,--nor yet the other type, a
life-long martyr of unselfishness. They are mixed generally, and
not unlike their married sisters, so far as I can see. Then as
to men, certainly I know heroes. One man, I knew, as high a
chevalier in heart as any Bayard of them all; one of those souls
simple and gentle as a woman, tender in knightly honour. He was
an old man, with a rusty brown coat and rustier wig, who spent
his life in a dingy village office. You poets would have laughed
at him. Well, well, his history never will be written. The
kind, sad, blue eyes are shut now. There is a little
farm-graveyard overgrown with privet and wild grape-vines, and a
flattened grave where he was laid to rest; and only a few who
knew him when they were children care to go there, and think of
what he was to them. But it was not in the far days of Chivalry