is full of passion and her eyes are full of
sleep." She is the sister of Lurly McLush, my old college chum, who, as
early as his sophomore year, was chosen president of the _Dolce far
niente_ Society--no member of which was ever known to be surprised at
anything--(the college law of rising before breakfast excepted). Lurly
introduced me to his sister one day, as he was lying upon a heap of
turnips, leaning on his elbow with his head in his hand, in a green lane
in the suburbs. He had driven over a stump, and been tossed out of his
gig, and I came up just as he was wondering how in the D----l's name he
got there! Albina sat quietly in the gig, and when I was presented,
requested me, with a delicious drawl, to say nothing about the
adventure--it would be so troublesome to relate it to everybody! I loved
her from that moment. Miss McLush was tall, and her shape, of its kind,
was perfect. It was not a _fleshy_ one exactly, but she was large and
full. Her skin was clear, fine-grained and transparent; her temples and
forehead perfectly rounded and polished, and her lips and chin swelling
into a ripe and tempting pout, like the cleft of a bursted apricot. And
then her eyes--large, liquid and sleepy--they languished beneath their
long black fringes as if they had no business with daylight--like two
magnificent dreams, surprised in their jet embryos by some bird-nesting
cherub. Oh! it was lovely to look into them!

She sat, usually, upon a _fauteuil_, with her large, full arm embedded
in the cushion, sometimes for hours without stirring. I have seen the
wind lift the masses of dark hair from her shoulders when it seemed like
the coming to life of a marble Hebe--she had been motionless so long.
She was a model for a goddess of sleep as she sat with her eyes half
closed, lifting up their superb lids slowly as you spoke to her, and
dropping them again with the deliberate motion of a cloud, when she had
murmured out her syllable of assent. Her figure, in a sitting posture,
presented a gentle declivity from the curve of her neck to the instep of
the small round foot lying on its side upon the ottoman. I remember a
fellow's bringing her a plate of fruit one evening. He was one of your
lively men--a horrid monster, all right angles and activity. Having
never been accustomed to hold her own plate, she had not well extricated
her whole fingers from her handkerchief before he set it down in her
lap. As it began to slide slowly toward her