sight,--a sort of impulse and instinct common to the dullest as the
quickest, the hardest reason as the liveliest fancy. Plain Cobbett,
seeing before the cottage-door, at her homeliest of house-work, the girl
of whom he said, "That girl should be my wife," and Dante, first thrilled
by the vision of Beatrice,--are alike true types of a common experience.
Whatever of love sinks the deepest is felt at first sight; it streams on
us abrupt from the cloud, a lightning flash,--a destiny revealed to us
face to face.

Now, there was nothing poetical in the place or the circumstance, still
less in the companionship in which this fair creature startled the virgin
heart of that careless boy; she was leaning on the arm of a stout, rosy-
faced matron in a puce-coloured gown, who was flanked on the other side
by a very small, very spare man, with a very wee face, the lower part of
which was enveloped in an immense belcher. Besides these two
incumbrances, the stout lady contrived to carry in her hands an umbrella,
a basket, and a pair of pattens.

In the midst of the strange, unfamiliar emotion which his eye conveyed to
his heart, Percival's ear was displeasingly jarred by the loud, bluff,
hearty voice of the girl's female companion--

"Gracious me! if that is not John Ardworth. Who'd have thought it? Why,
John,--I say, John!" and lifting her umbrella horizontally, she poked
aside two city clerks in front of her, wheeled round the little man on
her left, upon whom the clerks simultaneously bestowed the appellation of
"feller," and driving him, as being the sharpest and thinnest wedge at
hand, through a dense knot of some half-a-dozen gapers, while, following
his involuntary progress, she looked defiance on the malcontents, she
succeeded in clearing her way to the spot where stood the young man she