ith a packet labelled, "Archives of the _Star_." There are
several of the old Captain's editorials, including the one entitled
"Fudge," and of course the one about Roosevelt, a number of Nort's early
manuscripts, Fergus's version of Mark Twain, and five letters in
Anthy's firm handwriting.

This is a very curious document, this letter I have before me. The
outside of the envelope bears the name of Abraham Lincoln, and the
letter itself begins: "Dear Mr. Lincoln." It is in Anthy's hand.

Ever since I began writing this narrative I have been impatient to reach
this moment, but now that I am here, I hesitate. It is no common matter
to put down the secret imaginings of a woman's soul.

We all lead double lives: that which our friends and neighbours know,
and that which is invisible within us. Acquaintance gives us the outward
aspects of our neighbours, with friendship we penetrate a little way
into the deeper life, but when we love there is no glen too secret for
us, no upland too elusive, and we worship at the altars of the eternal
woods. Long before I knew Anthy well I knew something of her deeper
life, something more than that which looked out of her still eyes or
marked her quiet countenance. The quality of Anthy's silences were a
sign: and I surprised once the look she had when walking alone in a
country road. People who are shallow, or whose inner lives are harassed
by forms of fear ("most men," as Thoreau says, "live lives of quiet
desperation") rarely care to be silent, rarely wish to be alone with
themselves; but it is the sign of a noble nature that it has made terms
with itself.

One of the tragedies of life, perhaps the supreme tragedy, is that we
should be unable to follow those we love to their serenest heights. I
once knew a man who had lived for twenty years with a woman, and never
got beyond what he could see with the eyes of the flesh. The gate to the
uplands of the soul long stood open to him (and stands open now no
more); he passed that way, too, but he never went in.

I do not wish to imply that Anthy was a mere dreamer. She was not,
decidedly; but she had, always, her places of retirement. From a child
she had friends of her own imagining. The first of them I have already
referred to, a certain Richard and Rachel who came out through the wall
near the stairway in her father's house, to be the confidants of a
lonely child. Others came later as she grew older. I know the names of
some of them, and j