istics of that part of our country. For ten
years I applied myself exclusively to the details of business, having
but few associates, devoting my leisure to self-improvement, and
steadily accumulating a competency. On the death of a member of the firm
I took his place. Five years passed, and I had attained a fortune. Some
friends from the North called upon me in their travels, and during the
week of their visit, I participated in more gaieties than had been
comprised in my whole previous life. One evening it was proposed to
visit the theatre. Into a place of dramatic representation I had never
before entered, and the enchantment of all its accessories was
irresistible. But when the heroine of the evening appeared, I was
deprived of every faculty except that of the most absorbing adoration.
What was the drama enacted mattered not,--I had no perception of it, nor
of anything except the person who had fascinated me. Tall in figure,
commanding in gesture, scarcely developed into the full wealth of
womanhood, with an eye of piercing blackness, yet changing with every
gradation of passion, profuse black tresses, and a voice whose
intonations swayed the audience to every mood of feeling, SHE for the
first time appeared to me.

Well, I had passed my _premiere jeunesse_, and had arrived at that age
when a passion, once called into active life, becomes unappeasable. I
need not particularize the effects upon me of my first experience of
love. For weeks and months I had no desire, no ability to do anything
else than frequent the theatre. My want of acquaintance with all the
peculiar circumstances connected with actors and actresses almost
maddened me; for I knew of no method by which I might ever be able to
exchange a word with her who had become to me more than an idol to a
devotee, or the dream of fame to a poet. I sickened. To the physician
called in attendance, after much shrewd questioning on his part, I
revealed my secret. With a jocose laugh he left me, but in a half-hour
returned, accompanied by a somewhat vulgar-looking female, whom he
introduced as the mother of Evelyn Afton--the name of her for whom my
life was wasting and my soul pining.

The mother was the widow of an actor, and Evelyn her only daughter, who
had been bred for the stage, and her beauty and ability having secured
success, she had been enabled to attain all the accomplishments of
cultivated womanhood.

If anything could have disenchanted me, the manner