the play, began in this fashion--

"What, after all, is life but sensation, and sensation but
deception?--reality that pales before the light of one's dreams as
Octavia's dull beauty fades beside mine? But let me believe in some
intenser bliss, and seek it in the arms of death!"

"It seems decidedly passionate," I said. "Has the tragedy ever been
acted?"

"Never in public; but Madame Blumenthal tells me that she had it played
at her own house in Berlin, and that she herself undertook the part of
the heroine."

Pickering's unworldly life had not been of a sort to sharpen his
perception of the ridiculous, but it seemed to me an unmistakable sign of
his being under the charm, that this information was very soberly
offered. He was preoccupied, he was irresponsive to my experimental
observations on vulgar topics--the hot weather, the inn, the advent of
Adelina Patti. At last, uttering his thoughts, he announced that Madame
Blumenthal had proved to be an extraordinarily interesting woman. He
seemed to have quite forgotten our long talk in the Hartwaldt, and
betrayed no sense of this being a confession that he had taken his plunge
and was floating with the current. He only remembered that I had spoken
slightingly of the lady, and he now hinted that it behoved me to amend my
opinion. I had received the day before so strong an impression of a sort
of spiritual fastidiousness in my friend's nature, that on hearing now
the striking of a new hour, as it were, in his consciousness, and
observing how the echoes of the past were immediately quenched in its
music, I said to myself that it had certainly taken a delicate hand to
wind up that fine machine. No doubt Madame Blumenthal was a clever
woman. It is a good German custom at Homburg to spend the hour preceding
dinner in listening to the orchestra in the Kurgarten; Mozart and
Beethoven, for organisms in which the interfusion of soul and sense is
peculiarly mysterious, are a vigorous stimulus to the appetite. Pickering
and I conformed, as we had done the day before, to the fashion, and when
we were seated under the trees, he began to expatiate on his friend's
merits.

"I don't know whether she is eccentric or not," he said; "to me every one
seems eccentric, and it's not for me, yet a while, to measure people by
my narrow precedents. I never saw a gaming table in my life before, and
supposed that a gambler was of necessity some dusky villain with an evil
eye. In Ger