There is always an awkwardness in country places at rencounters between people who are unaccustomed to strangers. I hardly knew whether I should advance or retreat, and suffering my horse to take his own course, he carried me a little circuit behind a patch of trees that intervened between us. When I looked again she was gone. Scarcely a moment had elapsed, and she had vanished like a sunbow. I could hardly believe in a disappearance so miraculous, and rubbed my eyes, and gazed again and again over the vacant space before me. But she was nowhere to be seen. My curiosity was highly excited, and, dashing at full speed over the very spot she had so recently occupied, I traversed every outlet, but without success. It was broad noon. I knew all the bridle-tracks in and out of the valley, and it was impossible she could have taken any of them, and escaped my vigilant search in so short a time. What, then, was this form I had beheld? I had heard of Second Sight, and other visual deceptions--was this one of them? Had she melted into air? Had she come there only to mock me? Was I the victim of a self-delusion? The tortures of Tantalus were slight in comparison with the misery I felt as I rode round and round that sequestered dell, hoping in vain that she would return. But it was unlike any misery that had ever preyed upon me before. There was a strange thrill of expectation and uncertainty in it, and it pointed to an object in the future which, from that hour, gave me a novel interest in life. A total change had passed over me, and any change was welcome. Every day I renewed my visit to the same place, but the nymph of my pilgrimage never returned to the spot where I had first beheld her. Under this disappointment fancy liberally supplied a picture which sustained and heightened my desire to gaze once more on the reality. By a mental process, of which I can give no further account than that it is very well known to all readers of romance who are endowed with faith and imagination, I culled the most lovable and fascinating qualities of a hundred heroines--the tenderness and devotion, gentleness and grace, of all the Amandas, Isidoras, and Ethelindas, my brain had become intimately acquainted with--and compiled out of them a suitable Ideal for the worship of my perturbed affections. Nor was I satisfied with creating this imaginary enchantress by a sweeping contribution from the special charms of all the fine heroines I had read of, but I must needs put her into every possible emergency that could show off her beauty and her virtues to advantage. I believe I made her run the gauntlet of more perilous adventures and extraordinary trials than ever befell any single heroine in the whole library of fiction.