wing tendencies of my
youth. Though no longer, like the Harold described in Icelandic verse
by Regner Hairy-Breeches, "a young chief proud of my flowing locks,"
yet I still "spend my mornings among the young maidens," or such of
them as frequent the American Colony, as we call it, in Paris. I still
"love to converse with the handsome widows." Miss Ashburton, who
in one little passage of our youth treated me with considerable
disrespect, and who afterward married a person of great lingual
accomplishments, her father's late courier, at Naples, has been
handsomely forgiven, but not forgotten. A few intelligent ladies,
of marked listening powers and conspicuous accomplishments, are
habitually met by me at their residences in the neighborhood of the
Arc de Triomphe or at the receptions of the United States minister.
These fair attractions, although occupying, in practice, a
preponderating share of my time, are as nothing to me, however, in
comparison with that enticing illusion, my Book.

[Illustration]

The scientific use of the imagination in treating the places and
distances of Geography is the dream of my days and the insomnia of my
nights.

Every morning I take down and dust the loose sheets of my coming book
or polish the gilding of my former one. It is in my fidelity to these
baffling hopes--hopes fed with so many withered (or at least torn and
blotted) leaves--rather than in any resemblance authenticable by a
looking-glass, that I show my identity with the old long-haired and
nasal Flemming.

[Illustration]

Yet, though so long a Parisian, and so comfortable in my theoretic
pursuit of Progressive Geography, my leisure hours are unconsciously
given to knitting myself again to past associations, and some of my
deepest pleasures come from tearing open the ancient wounds. Shall
memory ever lose that sacred, that provoking day in the Vale of
Lauterbrunnen when the young mechanic in green serenaded us with his
guitar? It had for me that quite peculiar and personal application
that it immediately preceded my rejection by Miss Mary. The Staubbach
poured before our eyes, as from a hopper in the clouds, its Stream
of Dust. The Ashburtons, clad in the sensible and becoming fashion
of English lady-tourists, with long ringlets and Leghorn hats, sat
on either side of me upon the grass. And then that implacable youth,
looking full in my eye, sang his verses of insulting sagacity:

She gives thee a garland woven fair;