That types alter from generation to generation, that outlooks, views, feelings change, is a fact of which one can best judge by one’s self when one looks back into the past. For every man, though in most cases he hugs the delusion of being a uniform continuous ego with definite qualities of character, is himself a chain of the most diverse types. Every new experience—leaving quite out of account the bodily changes of blooming and fading, of health and disease—modifies the mental essence. How much one sees, whether with the bodily eye as a landscape or with the mental as an outlook on the world, is not a matter of stronger or weaker eyesight, but peculiarly a matter of horizon. If I look back into my childhood and youth, I do not see myself as the same person, as having altered, but see standing side by side the most diverse girl forms, each with a different horizon of ideas and filled with different hopes, interests, and sensations. And if I set beside them the forms from my maturer womanhood, or my present age, what have I (beyond the mere recollection, as faint as the recollection of pictures long since seen, or books long since read) in common with those phantoms, or they with me? Dissolving mists, flying shadows, a passing breath, is what life is. My first love was no meaner a person than Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria. To be sure I had never seen him,—only his picture,—but I idolized him ardently. That he would marry me did not seem to me at all beyond the bounds of possibility; on the contrary, fate owed me something of the sort. Of course I should have to wait five or six years yet, for I recognized that a ten-year-old child could not be made empress. I should have to have bloomed out into a maiden of fifteen or sixteen, the most beautiful maiden in the land; the young sovereign would sometime espy me, enter into a conversation with me, be ravished with my qualities of mind, and immediately lay his august person at my feet. That was the time when I was convinced that the world had a fairy-tale fortune ready for me. I exerted myself sincerely to deserve it and to be ready to show brilliantly, when it came, that I had found my right place; learning, learning, practicing, practicing, amazing myself with my progress and knowledge. I was a real infant prodigy—in my own eyes. It is true that I spoke French and English well (from my earliest childhood I had had French and English _bonnes_), I played the piano remarkably well, I had read an enormous deal: the Abbé Fleury’s _Histoire de France, Le Siège de la Rochelle_; Victor Hugo’s _Ruy Blas_ and _Marie Tudor_; half of Schiller, Fladung’s Physics; “Jane Eyre,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”—those were the books (not children’s books, it will be seen) in which I reveled at that age. Besides, I loved to dip into the cyclopedia and pluck blossoms of all branches of knowledge. From love of learning? I will not assert it; I think those lovely blossoms