"In the ducal palace," said he, "in which through the kindness of the younger members of the household, Pym and Peters were permitted to reside--at first only in the servants' quarters--the servants, however, being, at least in social manners, equal to the strangers--there were, besides the immediate family of the duke, many more or less close family connections. Among these was a young woman, corresponding in her period of life to New England women in their twentieth or twenty-first year, but really in her sixteenth year. Now I should imagine from the actions of that old sea-dog, Peters, lying there in his seventy-eighth or seventy-ninth year, and forty-nine years after he last set eyes on the young woman, that she must have been the loveliest being in a land of exceeding loveliness. Her eyes, the old man says, were in general like a tropical sky in a dead calm, but on occasions they resembled a tropical sky in a thunder-storm. She had one of those broad faces in which the cheeks stand out roundly, supporting in merriment a hundred changing forms, and laughing dimples enough to steal a heart of adamant--the loveliest face, when it is lovely, in all the world. Her hair was golden, but of the very lightest of pure gold--a golden white; and when in the extreme warmth of her island home she sat amid the trees, and it was allowed to fall away in rippling waves--to what then am I to liken it? It was transcendently beautiful. I think that I can feel its appearance. It must have looked like the sun's shimmer on the sea-foam from which rose Aphrodite; or like the glint from Cupid's golden arrow-heads as, later, sitting by the side of Aphrodite, he floated along the shores of queenly Hellas, in gleeful mischief shooting landward and piercing many a heart. Ah, love in youth! The cold reasoning world shall never take away that charm; and when the years shall cover with senile snows those who have felt it, then Intuition and not Reason shall give Faith to them as the only substitute for glories that have faded and gone. "But the form of this lovely being--what shall I say of her form! Here I pause. When Peters, at my urgent solicitation, attempted to describe it, he simply gurgled away into one of his spells of delirium. It was no use to try--though I did, again and again, try to draw from the old man something definite. It seems that she was so rounded and so proportioned as to meet every artistic demand, and to divert even from her beautiful face the glance of her enraptured beholders. If we are to gain an approximate idea of a figure so perfect, we must try to conceive what might be the result of a supreme effort of nature to show by comparison to the most artistic of her people just what puling infants they were in their attempts to create forms of true beauty from marble. "Her name was Lilama.