on the
subject of my museum, Miss Morne, I need hardly beg you to be more
discreet than I, and not to mention a domestic trifle of so little
general interest."

I could only bow, but longed, as I attended her to the door, to assure
her of the particular interest which I had already begun to feel in
every trifle which belonged to her.

Her little barouche, and long-tailed, dark-gray ponies, vanished with
her down the road; and I was left walking up and down the room. The
"kind o' poor-lookin', pale-lookin', queer-lookin' lady," that Miss
Mehitable had described,--was this she? How are we ever to know people
by descriptions, when the same person produces one impression on one
mind and quite another on another,--nay, may have one set of inherent
qualities brought out by contact with one character, and quite another
set by contact with another character? Have _I_ described Miss Dudley?
No,--and I cannot. She was both _unique_ and indescribable.

Most people impress us more, perhaps, by their outward and physical,
than by their inward and psychical life. On a first interview with them,
especially, we receive an impression of clothes, good or otherwise, of
beauty or plainness or ugliness of feature, and of correctness or
uncouthness of manner. These are the common people, whether ladies and
gentlemen, or simple men and women. There are, however, others, in all
ranks and conditions, so instinct and replete with spirit, that we
chiefly feel, when they have come in our way, that a spirit has passed
by,--that a new life has been brought in contact with our own life.

Of these was Miss Dudley. But because, ever since the day I write of, I
have loved to think of her, and because I know that, when I rejoin her,
I shall leave some behind me who will still love, and have a right to
hear of her, I will indulge myself in saying something more. That
something shall be what I said to myself then, as I promenaded to and
fro,--that bodily exercise was one of my safety-valves in those
times,--in the endeavor to work off so much of my superfluous animation
as to be in a state to sit down and paint again; and thus I spake: "I
must have had before me an uncommonly fine specimen of a class whose
existence I have conjectured before, but by no means including all the
wealthy, who wear their purple and fine linen both gracefully and
graciously, fare not more sumptuously than temperately every day, and do
a great deal, not only directly by their