I told you that I was perfectly sure, beforehand, we should find some pleasing girlish or womanly shape to fill the blank at our table and match the dark-haired youth at the upper corner.
There she sits, at the very opposite corner, just as far off as accident could put her from this handsome fellow, by whose side she ought, of course, to be sitting.One of the "positive" blondes, as my friend, you may remember, used to call them.Tawny-haired, amber-eyed, full-throated, skin as white as a blanched almond.Looks dreamy to me, not self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her neck sets it off as a Marie-Antoinette's diamond-necklace could not do.So in her dress, there is a harmony of tints that looks as if an artist had run his eye over her and given a hint or two like the finishing touch to a picture.I can't help being struck with her, for she is at once rounded and fine in feature, looks calm, as blondes are apt to, and as if she might run wild, if she were trifled with.It is just as I knew it would be,--and anybody can see that our young Marylander will be dead in love with her in a week.
Then if that little man would only turn out immensely rich and have the good-nature to die and leave them all his money, it would be as nice as a three-volume novel.
The Little Gentleman is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement of having such a charming neighbor next him.I judge so mainly by his silence and by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if he were thinking of something that had happened, or that might happen, or that ought to happen,--or how beautiful her young life looked, or how hardly Nature had dealt with him, or something which struck him silent, at any rate.I made several conversational openings for him, but he did not fire up as he often does.I even went so far as to indulge in, a fling at the State House, which, as we all know, is in truth a very imposing structure, covering less ground than St.Peter's, but of similar general effect.The little man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt.He said to the young lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he reddened a little,--so I thought.I don't think it right to watch persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,--but we all do it.
I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of the table, to make room for another newcomer of the lady sort.A well-mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a cap,--pretty wide in the parting, though,--contours vaguely hinted,--features very quiet,--says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye on the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her My record is a blank for some days after this.In the mean time Ihave contrived to make out the person and the story of our young lady, who, according to appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine for a boarding-house romance before a year is out.It is very curious that she should prove connected with a person many of us have heard of.Yet, curious as it is, I have been a hundred times struck with the circumstance that the most remote facts are constantly striking each other; just as vessels starting from ports thousands of miles apart pass close to each other in the naked breadth of the ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a crack of timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,--a cry mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some Gloucester fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls the name of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her lonely pillow,--a widow.
Oh, these mysterious meetings! Leaving all the vague, waste, endless spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed for them in the waters from the beginning of creation! Not only things and events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these surprises, that, if there were a reader in my parish who did not recognize the familiar occurrence of what I am now going to mention, I should think it a case for the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of Intelligence among the Comfortable Classes.
There are about as many twins in the births of thought as of children.For the first time in your lives you learn some fact or come across some idea.Within an hour, a day, a week, that same fact or idea strikes you from another quarter.It seems as if it had passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from the blank wall that shuts in the world of thought.Yet no possible connection exists between the two channels by which the thought or the fact arrived.Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.
One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons-table boarders, which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard of.Young fellows being always hungry--Allow me to stop dead-short, in order to utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of the blank interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the cavity of a geode.
Aphorism by the Professor.
In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals.If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night.If old, it observes stated periods, and you might as well attempt to regulate the time of highwater to suit a fishing-party as to change these periods.
The crucial experiment is this.Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner.If this is eagerly accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established.If the subject of the question starts back and expresses surprise and incredulity, as if you could not possibly be in earnest, the fact of maturity is no less clear.
