ng time we could not speak. At length
he contrived to subdue his emotions. As for myself, I was too much
disturbed to be able to utter a word; I felt as if I should swoon, and
returned home hastily. Two days afterwards I was seized with a fever,
which at first the doctors thought would prove mortal."

Her strong constitution carried her through it. On her recovery, in her
burning impatience to escape from the parental roof, she declared she
would accept the first person who sought her hand, provided he was a man
of a certain age; by this proviso wishing her lover to understand that
her marriage was wholly due to constraint. An advocate of some repute, a
Herr Pfeiffer, proposed and was accepted. This was in 1820.

A marriage made under such conditions could hardly prove a happy one.
Her husband was unworthy of her. He treated her harshly, and he wasted
the fortune she brought him. But for the sake of her two sons, Oscar and
Alfred, she endured the miseries of her position as long as she was
able, and devoted herself with assiduous self-sacrifice to their
education. Meanwhile, the prosaic character of her daily life she knew
how to relieve by privately indulging in dreams of travel, of adventure
in far lands, and exploration in isles beyond the sunset. On the
occasion of an excursion to Trieste, the sight of the sea revived in her
all the old passionate longing, and the visions of her childhood became
the fixed resolves and convictions of her womanhood.

MADAME IDA PFEIFFER.

II.

At length she was free to indulge her long-cherished inclinations. Her
sons stood no longer in need of her support; her husband was separated
from her and was living in retirement at Lemberg; her means, though
moderate, were not inadequate to the fulfilment of the projects she had
in view. It was true she was forty-five years old, and that is not an
age at which one usually attempts a tour round the world; but, on the
other hand, it invested a woman with a certain degree of security, and
it rendered more feasible an enterprise which in any case was beset with
difficulties.

Having completed the necessary preparations, she set out on her first
great journey in March, 1842. It was natural enough that a woman of
religious temperament should be attracted to the Holy Land. She visited
its holiest places, and the effect they produced upon her imagination is
a proof that years and the cares of domestic life had in no wise
chilled its ear