acquaintance who insists that it is the place above all others suited to
see life in every striking phase. He pretends to have witnessed there the
reunion of friends who had not met in many years, the embrace, figurative
of course, of long lost brothers, the reconciliation of lovers; I do not
know but also some scenes of love-making, and acceptance or rejection. But
my friend is an imaginative man, and may make himself romances. I myself
profess to have beheld for the most part only mysteries; and I think it
not the least of these that, riding on the same cars day after day, one
finds so many strange faces with so little variety. Whether or not that
dull, jarring motion shakes inward and settles about the centres of mental
life the sprightliness that should inform the visage, I do not know; but
it is certain that the emptiness of the average passenger's countenance is
something wonderful, considered with reference to Nature's abhorrence of a
vacuum, and the intellectual repute which Boston enjoys among envious New-
Yorkers. It is seldom that a journey out of our cold metropolis is
enlivened by a mystery so positive in character as the young lady in
black, who alighted at a most ordinary little street in Old Charlesbridge,
and heightened her effect by going into a French-roof house there that had
no more right than a dry goods box to receive a mystery. She was tall,
and her lovely arms showed through the black gauze of her dress with
an exquisite roundness and _morbidezza_. Upon her beautiful wrists
she had heavy bracelets of dead gold, fashioned after some Etruscan
device; and from her dainty ears hung great hoops of the same metal
and design, which had the singular privilege of touching, now and then,
her white columnar neck. A massive chain or necklace, also Etruscan,
and also gold, rose and fell at her throat, and on one little ungloved
hand glittered a multitude of rings. This hand was very expressive,
and took a principal part in the talk which the lady held with her
companion, and was as alert and quick as if trained in the gesticulation
of Southern or Latin life somewhere. Her features, on the contrary,