e raise them suddenly
to my face, she shrieked with terror, and fell fainting upon the
floor, at the very moment that I placed the glasses before my eyes,
and beheld--myself, reflected in the mirror, before which she had been
standing.

"Dear madam," cried Titbottom, to my wife, springing up and falling
back again in his chair, pale and trembling, while Prue ran to him and
took his hand, and I poured out a glass of water--"I saw myself."

There was silence for many minutes. Prue laid her hand gently upon the
head of our guest, whose eyes were closed, and who breathed softly,
like an infant in sleeping. Perhaps, in all the long years of anguish
since that hour, no tender hand had touched his brow, nor wiped away
the damps of a bitter sorrow. Perhaps the tender, maternal fingers of
my wife soothed his weary head with the conviction that he felt the
hand of his mother playing with the long hair of her boy in the soft
West Indian morning. Perhaps it was only the natural relief of
expressing a pent-up sorrow. When he spoke again, it was with the old,
subdued tone, and the air of quaint solemnity.

"These things were matters of long, long ago, and I came to this
country soon after. I brought with me, premature age, a past of
melancholy memories, and the magic spectacles. I had become their
slave. I had nothing more to fear. Having seen myself, I was compelled
to see others, properly to understand my relations to them. The lights
that cheer the future of other men had gone out for me. My eyes were
those of an exile turned backwards upon the receding shore, and not
forwards with hope upon the ocean. I mingled with men, but with little
pleasure. There are but many varieties of a few types. I did not find
those I came to clearer sighted than those I had left behind. I heard
men called shrewd and wise, and report said they were highly
intelligent and successful. But when I looked at them through my
glasses, I found no halo of real manliness. My finest sense detected
no aroma of purity and principle; but I saw only a fungus that had
fattened and spread in a night. They all went to the theater to see
actors upon the stage. I went to see actors in the boxes, so
consummately cunning, that the others did not know they were acting,
and they did not suspect it themselves.

"Perhaps you wonder it did not make me misanthropical. My dear
friends, do not forget that I had seen myself. It made me
compassionate, not cynical. Of course I c