Albina McLush is divine. She is like the description of the Persian beauty by Hafiz: “Her heart is full of passion, and her eyes are full of sleep.” She is the sister of Lurly McLush, my old college chum, who, as early as his sophomore year, was chosen president of the Dolcefarniente Society, no member of which was ever known to be surprised at anything—(the college law of rising before breakfast excepted). Lurly introduced me to his sister one day, as he was lying upon a heap of turnips, leaning on his elbow with his head in his hand, in a green lane in the suburbs. He had driven over a stump, and been tossed out of his gig, and I came up just as he was wondering how in the d—l’s name he got there. Albina sat quietly in the gig, and when I was presented, requested me, with a delicious drawl, to say nothing about the adventure—“it would be so troublesome to relate it to everybody!” I loved her from that moment. Miss McLush was tall, and her shape, of its kind, was perfect. It was not a fleshy one exactly, but she was large and full. Her skin was clear, fine-grained and transparent; her temples and forehead perfectly rounded and polished, and her lips and chin swelling into a ripe and tempting pout, like the cleft of a burst apricot. And then her eyes—large, languid, and sleepy—they languished beneath their long, black fringes as if they had no business with daylight—like two magnificent dreams, surprised in their jet embryos by some bird-nesting cherub. Oh! it was lovely to look into them! She sat usually upon a _fauteuil_, with her large, full arm embedded in the cushion, sometimes for hours without stirring. I have seen the wind lift the masses of dark hair from her shoulders, when it seemed like the coming to life of a marble Hebe—she had been motionless so long. She was a model for a goddess of sleep; as she sat with her eyes half-closed, lifting up their superb lips slowly as you spoke to her, and dropping them again with the deliberate motion of a cloud, when she had murmured out her syllable of assent. Her figure, in a sitting posture, presented a gentle declivity from the curve of her neck to the instep of the small round foot lying on its side upon the ottoman. I remember a fellow bringing her a plate of fruit one evening. He was one of your lively men—a horrid monster, all right angles and activity. Having never been accustomed to hold her own plate, she had not well extracted her whole fingers from her handkerchief before he set it down in her lap. As it began slowly to slide towards her feet, her hand relapsed into the muslin folds, and she fixed her eyes upon it with a kind of indolent surprise, drooping her lids gradually, till, as the fruit scattered over the ottoman, they closed entirely, and a liquid jet line was alone visible through the heavy lashes. There was an imperial indifference in it worthy of Juno.