spirit,
cultivation, and intellectuality. Their father was a man of taste and
education, and, being somewhat above vulgar prejudices, permitted the
visits of the hero of my story. Still he did not altogether encourage
the affection which he found springing up between Mary and the poet.
When, however, he found that her affections were engaged, he did not
withhold his consent from her marriage, and the recluse bore to his
solitary mansion the young bride of his affections. O sir, the house
assumed a new appearance within and without. Roses bloomed in the
garden, jessamines peeped through its lattices, and the fields about
it smiled with the effects of careful cultivation. Lights were seen in
the little parlor in the evening, and many a time would the passenger
pause by the garden gate to listen to strains of the sweetest music,
breathed by choral voices from the cottage. If the mysterious student
and his wife were neglected by their neighbors, what cared they? Their
endearing and mutual affection made their home a little paradise. But
death came to Eden. Mary fell suddenly sick, and, after a few hours'
illness, died in the arms of her husband and her sister Madeleine.
This was the student's second heavy affliction.

"Days, months, rolled on, and the only solace of the bereaved was to
sit with the sisters of the deceased, and talk of the lost one. To
Adelaide, at length, he offered his widowed heart. She came to his
lone house like the dove, bearing the olive branch of peace and
consolation. Their bridal was not one of revelry and mirth, for a sad
recollection brooded over the hour. Yet they lived happily; the
husband again smiled, and, with a new spring, the roses again
blossomed in their garden. But it seemed as if a fatality pursued this
singular man. When the rose withered and the leaf fell, in the mellow
autumn of the year, Adelaide, too, sickened and died, like her younger
sister, in the arms of her husband and of Madeleine.

"Perhaps you will think it strange, young man, that, after all, the
wretched survivor stood again at the altar. But he was a mysterious
being, whose ways were inscrutable, who, thirsting for domestic bliss,
was doomed ever to seek and never to find it. His third bride was
Madeleine. I well remember her. She was a beauty, in the true sense of
the word. It may seem strange to you to hear the praise of beauty from
such lips as mine; but I cannot help expatiating upon hers. She might
have sat upo