ldly figured.
The embers of a fire smouldered and smoked upon the hearth, to which a
chair had been drawn close. And yet the aspect of the chamber was
ascetic to the degree of sternness; the chair was uncushioned; the floor
and walls were naked; and beyond the books which lay here and there in
some confusion, there was no instrument of either work or pleasure. The
sight of books in the house of such a family exceedingly amazed me; and
I began with a great hurry, and in momentary fear of interruption, to go
from one to another and hastily inspect their character. They were of
all sorts, devotional, historical, and scientific, but mostly of a great
age and in the Latin tongue. Some I could see to bear the marks of
constant study; others had been torn across and tossed aside as if in
petulance or disapproval. Lastly, as I cruised about that empty chamber,
I espied some papers written upon with pencil on a table near the
window. An unthinking curiosity led me to take one up. It bore a copy of
verses, very roughly metred in the original Spanish, and which I may
render somewhat thus--

"Pleasure approached with pain and shame,
Grief with a wreath of lilies came.
Pleasure showed the lovely sun;
Jesu dear, how sweet it shone!
Grief with her worn hand pointed on,
Jesu dear, to Thee!"

Shame and confusion at once fell on me; and, laying down the paper, I
beat an immediate retreat from the apartment. Neither Felipe nor his
mother could have read the books nor written these rough but feeling
verses. It was plain I had stumbled with sacrilegious feet into the room
of the daughter of the house. God knows, my own heart most sharply
punished me for my indiscretion. The thought that I had thus secretly
pushed my way into the confidence of a girl so strangely situated, and
the fear that she might somehow come to hear of it, oppressed me like
guilt. I blamed myself besides for my suspicions of the night before;
wondered that I should ever have attributed those shocking cries to one
of whom I now conceived as of a saint, spectral of mien, wasted with
maceration, bound up in the practices of a mechanical devotion, and
dwelling in a great isolation of soul with her incongruous relatives;
and as I leaned on the balustrade of the gallery and looked down into
the bright close of pomegranates and at the gaily dressed and somnolent
woman, who just then stretched herself and delicately licked her lips as
in the very se