Dressed as a youth, I seemed to descend from my carriage and seize your hand, and you knew all. Silently we walked through the streets, hand in hand, until we reached your house. There, I told you everything about my lonely childhood, my joyless youth, and the world of dreams and ideals within me. You spoke earnest words of duty and work, called me your friend, and said we would go along part of the way side by side.... After a winter of severe work came bright, sunny days of spring, and I felt at last that in the arms of nature, at her pure altar, I had received a “purer life, and the glad courage of hopeful youth.” I hope you will return my frankness in full. When we end our correspondence, and return after this bold aside into the track of everyday life, perhaps we shall bring back some new, fresh courage, and the graceful memory of having been for once in our lives as foolish as we pleased. Kind greetings from your UNKNOWN. IV. HIGHLY-ESTEEMED UNKNOWN FRIEND,--Your amiable letter made me supremely happy. Now I know without a doubt that the mysterious quality of reading the soul of a being akin in spirit is no empty illusion. In that deeply mystical moment I recognised your charming self just as you describe it with winning simplicity. What you write me in many pages I have read word for word out of your eyes. And now that I know how near you are to me in sympathy and in intuitive understanding, now I have so much to say to you, so much to receive from you, that it were a crime not to tear down the paper barriers between us and to replace the dead letter by the living word. I only await your permission. I promise myself a great deal from this meeting, perhaps a friendship for life, and I warmly beg you to look upon the unusual beginning as an earnest of a happy end. Hoping impatiently for a gracious reply, I am, your truly devoted, UNKNOWN. V. DEAR FRIEND,--Allow me to tell you that, in spite of your somewhat too lively imagination, I have always looked upon you as a person of much sense, and that there is nothing that moves me more to pity than to see a sensible man attacked by a fashionable craze like spiritualism. I am always seized by the desire to heal the patient, which seems the more difficult the absurder--forgive the word, but I know no better--the cause of the attack. [Illustration: “THE UNUTTERABLE EXPRESSION IT PRODUCED UPON MY VISAGE.”] I hope you will laugh heartily over the following story, and have a healthful feeling of convalescence when you have bravely conquered the first bitter taste of the medicine. A young widow, living in great seclusion, allows an old friend of her husband’s to persuade her to make a concession to him and to the carnival, and visit a masked ball at his house, in company of her brother, a comely school-boy.