Peace," and "Tennyson" turned on its face at "Fatima," a heavy
volume of French moral philosophy, a Methodist hymn-book, Sir Thomas
Browne's "Hydriotaphia," and a gilded red-bound history of "Five Little
Pigs."

I rang the bell, and ordered all the books to be gathered up and put
into an old bookcase, long banished to a dark attic. I walked to the
fire and leaned my head against the mantel. The embers were all dead; in
the gray ashes was the print of a little foot, whose arched instep had
left no trace between the light track of the small heel and the deeper
impression that the slender toe had left. That footprint told the
secret of her airy motion,--that step so akin to flight, that on an
overhanging mountain-ledge I had more than once held my breath, looking
to see her extended wings float over the silent tree-tops below, or
longed to grasp her carelessly trailed shawl, that I might detain her
upon earth. To me the track had yet another language. An hour before,
as I stood there beside her, the bitter passion of a man solitary and
desperate shaking every faculty before the level rays of her scornful
eye, she had set her embroidered slipper in the ashes, and said,--"Look!
I leave a print there which the first breath of air shall dissipate;
all fire becomes ashes, and ashes blow away,"--and so left me. I stood
before the fire, that had been, still looking at that foot-mark; my
brain was stunned and stupid, my heart beat slow and loud; I knew
nothing, I felt nothing. I was nothing. Presently a bell rang.

The world is full of magicians, transformations, magnetic miracles,
juggling, chemical astonishments, moral gymnastics, hypocrisies, lies of
wonder,--but what is so strange, so marvellous, so inexplicable, as the
power of conventions? One minute found me tempting the blackness of
darkness, every idea astray and reeling, every emotion benumbed; the
next, a bell rang, and I went to the tea-table, sat in my own place,
answered my mother's questions, resumed the politenesses and habits of
daily life, seemed to be myself to those who had known me always,--ate,
drank, jested,--was a man,--no more the trodden ashes under a girl's
foot, no longer the sport of a girl's cool eye, no slave, no writhing
idolater under the car-wheel; and this lasted-half an hour! You have
seen the horses of Pharaoh following the glittering sand-track of the
Judaean host, walled in with curling beryl battlements, over whose
crests the white sea-foam