oner live in the most abject poverty, and suffer
any amount of privation, than part with the work, the consummation
of which will be the glory of your life. Part with your clock! no, I
would sooner sell this hair which you so prize, part with all those
qualities which render me dear to you; nay more, I think I would even
be content to sacrifice your love rather than see all the results of
your patient industry wasted, your noble ambition sacrificed. Think
of me, dear Dumiger, but think of me only as a part of yourself, as
one who would give up every hope and every future to secure your
happiness, that is, your fame."

Dumiger rose from his seat, unmindful in whose presence he stood,
he pressed Marguerite in his arms; again the nobility of his mind
brightened in his eye and beamed over his countenance. It was another
instance amid the thousand which, unknown to them, were passing around
them of a man won to noble thoughts by a woman's influence, proving
that she is the animating power to save him in all his difficulties;
that she invokes and renews all those noble thoughts which are
concealed in the recesses of his mind. Hers is the light to dispel
the mists which the chill atmosphere of the world hangs around the
brightest portions of the mind: great at all times, greatest of all
when, in a moment of difficulty, she is called upon to decide between
the good and the evil, the just and the unjust, the generous and
the mean, the ingenuous and the sophistical; and Marguerite, in one
glance, saw all that Dumiger had failed to discover in the Count's
appearance and manner,--the dark design, the selfish calculation; her
simplicity of mind perceived indications of low, mean purposes, which
he failed to discern. Thus it is ever that the first impressions, and,
above all other first impressions, the impressions of innocence and
youth, are the truest and most to be depended on.

For wherein is it that men--so often men of the shrewdest intelligence
and keenest intellect--deceive themselves by their own egregious
vanity.--by that vanity which makes them prefer to depend on the
refinements and subtle processes of their own intelligence, rather
than on the first impressions of the mind which Heaven has bestowed
upon them? They are not satisfied with perceiving that a thing is
good, but they must learn why it is so. They are not satisfied with
knowing that the world is beautiful, that the harmony of this globe
and its planets is adm