een already too
late, when Optima touched the shoulder of this modern Parsee, and
suggested, calmly,--

"If you burn your eyes out here, my dear Miselle, you will be unable to
see anything else."

The thought was a kind and sensible one, as, coming from Optima, it
could not have failed of being; and Miselle stood upright, stared
forlornly about her, and found the world very pale and weak, very cold
and dark.

Was it to solace her sudden exile from fairy-land, or was it only as a
customary courtesy, that an old man, wasted and paled by years of
ministration at this fiery shrine, now seized a long, hollow iron rod,
called a blow-stick, and, thrusting the smaller end into the pot,
withdrew a small portion of the glass, and, while retaining it by a
swift twirl, presented the mouth-piece of the tube to Miselle with a
gesture so expressive that she immediately applied her lips to those of
the blow-stick, and rounded her cheeks to the similitude of those
corpulent little Breezes whom the old masters are so fond of depicting
attendant upon the flight of their brothers the Winds?

Ah, my little dears, with your straws and soap-suds you will never blow
a bubble like that! As it slowly rounded to its perfect sphere, what
secrets of its birth within that glowing furnace, what mysteries of the
pure element whose creation it seemed, flashed in fiery hieroglyph
athwart its surface! A mocking globe, whereon were painted realms that
may none the less exist, because man's feeble vision has never seen
them, his fettered mind never imagined them. Who knows? It may have been
the surface of the sun that was for one instant drawn upon that ball of
liquid fire. Who is to limit the affinities, the subtle reproductions of
Nature's grand ideas?

But as the wonder culminated, as the glancing rays resolved themselves
into more positive lines, as the enigma seemed about to offer its own
solution, the bubble broke, flew into a myriad tiny shards, which, with
a tinkling laugh, fell to the grimy pavement, and lay there sparkling
malicious fun into Miselle's eyes.

Cicerone stooped and gathered some of the fragments. Surely, never was
substance so closely allied to shadow. The lightest touch, a breath
even, and they were gone,--and were they caught, it was like the capture
of one of the floating films of a summer morning, glancing brightly to
the eye, but impalpable to the touch.

When all had looked, the guide slowly closed his hand with a cru