_I_ really was in love then, Jeremy. Don’t you think so? But I was as jealous as a Turk—a passion which you, from a lack of concentration, thought very unreasonable. It _was_, too, considering that it was engendered _before I_ _had ever spoken to the lady_, and finally exploded very foolishly, and harmlessly, too, I believe, upon the head of an innocent old teacher of Latin Grammar, or something of that sort, old enough to be the lady’s grandfather, who _would_ be looking over her album. I wrote my last piece of poetry after that, which _did my business_ in that quarter, for the lady refused to see me or my poetry any more. The loss, I think, was hers in the long run, though I suffered with a heart-ache and prospective suicide for a month or two. I was very much like the poor man in the story book, however, “For when I saw my eyes were out, With all my might and main, I jumped into another bush, And scratched them in again.” The process was a rough one, and left a scar behind. I never saw the lady but once afterward, and that was at Niblo’s. I confess to a heart-fluttering, Jeremy, and some of that Spanish fierceness for making declarations, which you used to laugh at; but fortune or fate denied me means and opportunity; when the Vaudeville was over she was led off by her party—_and I lost her_. “I saw her depart as the crowd hurried on, Like the moon down the ocean, the graceful was gone! On my ear her adieu, with its dulcimer swell, Like the gush of cool waters in melody fell. “Starry stranger! so dazzlingly distant—unknown— And observed in thy luminous transit alone; By what fiat supreme must thy brilliancy quiver O’er the depths of my darkened existence forever!” But our old friend C——, he’s married now, and is the happy father of eight children, I believe. He always _had_ an insane passion for crowds. Do you remember the night he escorted the whole boarding-school home with his umbrella; he always _would_, like the author of “Calavar,” have his umbrella with him—_a green one_—and this night the gods were propitious. It blew a hurricane, and the rain came pitching down in sheets, as if Niagara had attached a spout to the passing clouds. C—— plied between the concert-room and the boarding-school, with the regularity and precision of a Brooklyn ferry-boat, showing his regard for the _fair_. After having deposited the fifteenth damsel safely, he totally upset the propriety of an elderly lady who opened the door with a polite invitation for him to “walk in”—an open sesame worth a ducat—with the information that “_he was afraid_ _some more of the folks were without umbrellas, and he must_ _see them home!_” A spirit of self-denial and enlarged philanthropy worthy of a martyr.