ars, with twittering birds overhead and a
sobbing sea at my feet. How long--how long before that dreamless
slumber will fall upon my heavy lids,--weary with waiting? Only
twenty-three yesterday! My God, if I should live to be an old woman!
The very thought threatens insanity! Ten--twenty--possibly thirty
years ahead of me. No; I could not endure it,--I should go mad, or
destroy myself! If I were a delicate woman, if I only had weak lungs
or a dropsical heart, or a taint of any hereditary infirmity that
would surely curtail my days, I could be tolerably patient, hoping
daily for the symptoms to develop themselves. But, unfortunately,
though my family all died early, no two members, selected the same
mode of escape from this bastile of clay; and my flesh is sound, and I
am as strong and compact as that granite balustrade, and--ha!
ha!--quite as hard. _Au pis aller_, if the burden of life becomes
utterly intolerable I can shuffle it off as quickly as did that proud
Roman, who, 'when the birds began to sing' in the dawn of a day
heralded by tempestuous winds laden with perfume from the vales of
Sicily, shut his eyes forever from the warm sparkling Mediterranean
billows that broke in the roads of Utica, and pricked the memory of
inattentive Azrael with the point of a sword. Neither Phaedo, family,
nor fame, could coax Cato to respect the prerogative of Atropos; and
if he, 'the only free and unconquered man,' quailed and fled before
the apparition of numerous advancing years, what marvel that I, who am
neither sage nor Roman, should be tempted some fine morning when the
birds are sounding _reveille_ around my chamber windows, to imitate
'what Cato did, and Addison approved'? After all, what despicable
cowards are human hearts, and how much easier to die like Socrates,
Seneca, and Zeno, than stagger and groan under the load of hated,
torturing years, that are about as welcome to my shoulders as the 'old
man of the sea' to Sinbad's! How long?--oh, how long?"

The gloomy gray eyes had kindled into a dull flicker that resembled
the fitful, ghostly gleam of sheet lightning, falling through painted
windows upon crumbling and defiled altars in some lonely ruined
cathedral; and her low, shuddering tones, were full of a hopeless,
sneering bitterness, as painfully startling and out of place in a
woman's voice as would be the scream of a condor from the irised
throats of brooding doves, or the hungry howl of a wolf from the
tender lips