t was doubtless because they partook of
the quality of a curiosity that he had preserved them.

There was also one of those slung-shots such as may be bought along
water fronts where seamen foregather: a small leather sack, loaded with
shot and suspended from a wrist-strap.

At the extreme bottom of the package, carefully preserved between two
sheets of thick cardboard, lay a page torn from a newspaper. It was on
that heavy, glossed paper which some journals use for their pictorial
sections and was covered with miscellaneous illustrations.

I was on the point of throwing the thing away, when some impulse led me
to turn it over. What I saw altered and remoulded all my life from that
moment forward.

A curtain of dusk was beginning to fall upon the hinterland at the edge
of the forest. The fringe of cane and palm was filling up with shadow
and the peak of the volcano was brooding against a sky of burnished
copper.

When I turned the sheet it was as though I had come face to face with an
actual personality where a moment ago there had been nothing animate.
Of course it was only because the art of photographer and engraver had
ably abetted each other, but the portrait which worthily filled the
seven columns of glazed paper was a marvel of lifelike presentment--and
of indescribable loveliness.

There are authenticated cases, in plenty, of men who have loved a face
seen only in a picture. The Mona Lisa of da Vinci has laid over many
beholders the hypnotic spell of the long-dead woman immortalized upon
its canvas. Pygmalion loved his Galatea. I fancy that, if the truth were
told, I loved in that first flash of view the lady who smiled out at me
from the lifelessness of ink and paper. The margins of the sheet had
been so close trimmed at the top that no date or caption remained, but
beneath, the scissors had left two words: "Miss Frances--" and with
these two words I must content myself.

But for the picture itself.

I have already confessed my passionate reverence for beauty. Here before
me was beauty of the purest type I have ever been privileged to see. It
was not the brush magic of a gifted painter who has caught from a lovely
model the charm of line and color and canonized them with idealization.
It lacked all the fire with which the palette might have kindled it. It
recorded nothing more than the lens had seen, yet its flawlessness
required no aid of art and asked no odds of color.

Her clear, young eyes smiled