nothing about my boyhood.
Twenty-five years ago a poor boy-but no matter. _I_ was that boy! I
hurry on to the soaring period of manhood, 'when the strength, the
nerve, the intellect is or should be at its height,' or _are_ or should
be at _their_ height, if you _must_ have grammar in a Christmas Annual.
_My_ nerve was at its height: I was thirty.

Yet, what was I then? A miserable moonstruck mortal, duly entitled to
write M.D. (of Tarrytown College, Alaska) after my name--for the title
of Doctor is useful in the profession--but with no other source of
enjoyment or emotional recreation in a cold, casual world. Often and
often have I written M.D. after my name, till the glowing pleasure
palled, and I have sunk back asking, 'Has life, then, no more than this
to offer?'

Bear with me if I write like this for ever so many pages; bear with me,
it is such easy writing, and only thus can I hope to make you understand
my subsequent and slightly peculiar conduct.

How rare was hers, the loveliness of the woman I lost--of her whose loss
brought me down to the condition I attempt to depict!

How strange was her rich beauty! She was at once dark and fair--_la
blonde et la brune!_ How different from the Spotted Girls and Two-headed
Nightingales whom I have often seen exhibited, and drawing money too, as
the types of physical imperfections! Warm Southern blood glowed darkly
in one of Philippa's cheeks--the left; pale Teutonic grace smiled in the
other--the right. Her mother was a fair blonde Englishwoman, but it
was Old Calabar that gave her daughter those curls of sable wool,
contrasting so exquisitely with her silken-golden tresses. Her English
mother may have lent Philippa many exquisite graces, but it was from her
father, a pure-blooded negro, that she inherited her classic outline of
profile.

Philippa, in fact, was a natural arrangement in black and white. Viewed
from one side she appeared the Venus of the Gold Coast, from the other
she outshone the Hellenic Aphrodite. From any point of view she was
an extraordinarily attractive addition to the Exhibition and Menagerie
which at that time I was running in the Midland Counties.

Her father, the nature of whose avocation I never thought it necessary
to inquire into, was a sea cook on board a Peninsular and Oriental
steamer. His profession thus prevented him from being a permanent
resident in this, or indeed in any other country.

Our first meeting was brought about in a mos