e more. And you, Ernest, I cannot call you any thing
else, you are another and yet the same. The same stately, statue-like
being I used to try in vain to teaze and torment. It seems so long since
we have met, I expected to have seen you quite bent and hoary with age.
Do tell me something of your transatlantic experience."

While she was speaking in that peculiar tone of voice which reminded one
of a distant clarion, Richard Clyde came to me on the other side, and
seeing that she wished to engage the conversation of Ernest, which she
probably thought I had engrossed too long, I took the offered arm of
Richard and returned to the drawing-room. Seeing a table covered with
engravings, I directed our steps there, that subjects of conversation
might be suggested independent of ourselves.

"How exquisite these are!" I exclaimed, taking up the first within my
reach and expatiating on its beauties, without really comprehending one
with my preoccupied and distant thoughts. "These Italian landscapes are
always charming."

"I believe that is a picture of the Boston Common," said he, smiling at
my mistake; "but surely no Italian landscape can boast of such
magnificent trees and such breadth of verdure. It is a whole casket of
emeralds set in the granite heart of a great city. And see in the centre
that pure, sparkling diamond, sending out such rays of coolness and
delight,--I wonder you did not recognize it."

"I have seen it only in winter, when the trees exhibited their wintry
dreariness, and little boys were skating on the diamond surface of that
frozen water. It looked very different then."

"Mr. Linwood could explain these engravings," said he, drawing forward
some which indeed represented Italian ruins, grand and ivy mantled,
where the owl might well assert her solitary domain. "He has two great
advantages, an eye enlightened by travel, and a taste fastidious by
nature."

"I do not admire fastidiousness," I answered; "I do not like to have
defects pointed out to me, which my own ignorance does not discover.
There is more pleasure in imagining beauties than in finding out
faults."

"Will you think it a presuming question, a too inquisitive one," he
said, holding up an engraving between himself and the light, "if I ask
your candid opinion of Mr. Linwood? Is the world right in the character
it has given? Has he all the peculiarities and fascinations it ascribes
to him?"

He spoke in a careless manner, or rather tried to