What lies at the bottom? the visible desire, the effort to please and to be loved, translated in a hundred different manners by the eloquence of light. One, of an unrivalled blue, with a head of rubies, outvies with its scintillation the red-hot coal. Another, of a more melancholy cast, plunges into a sombre red. A third, of flame-coloured yellow, fading and passing into green, seems to express the languors, swoons, and storms of the violent loves of the South. The ardent daughter of Spain, rendered more impassioned by the American sky, puts her hand on the creature of the flame, and seizes upon it as her own. She makes it a talisman, a jewel, and a victim. Burning, she places it on her burning bosom, where it must soon perish. There is no purpose to which she does not turn it. By a triumph of audacious coquetry, linking the insects with silk, or imprisoning them in gauze, she wreathes the animated flames in glowing necklaces, and rolls them around her waist in girdles of fire. The queens of the ball are crowned with an infernal diadem of living topazes, of throbbing emeralds, which flicker or gleam (through suffering or love?). A brilliant but funereal decoration, of sinister magnetism, whose charm is enhanced by a sentiment of death. They dance; the waning flame associates its tender gleams with the languishing glances of a deep black eye. They dance; without end and without reason, without pity or remembrance of the amorous light dying and fading on their bosom, and having no power to say: "Replace me where you captured me!" [Illustration] [Illustration: VI.--THE SILKWORM.] [Illustration] CHAPTER VI. THE SILKWORM. "The ideal of the human arts of spinning and weaving,"--said to me one day a Southerner (a manufacturer, but a man of imagination),--"the ideal which we always follow is a woman's beautiful hair! Oh, how far are the softest wools or finest cotton from approaching it! At what an enormous distance does all, and ever will all, our progress leave us! We drag ourselves onward, a long, long way in the rear, and enviously regard that supreme perfection which Nature daily realizes as a mere matter of pastime. "That delicate, yet strong and tenacious hair, vibrating with an exquisite sonority which goes from the ear to the heart, and yet withal so soft, warm, luminous, and electrical--is the flower of the human flower. "Men fruitlessly dispute respecting the merits of colour. What does it matter? The brilliant black contains and promises the flame; the blonde displays it with the splendours of the Golden Fleece. The sunny brown appropriates the very sun, makes use of it, blends it with its mirages, floats, and undulates, and incessantly varies in its streaming reflexes, now smiles with light, now deepens into gloom, always deceives, and, whatever we may say, deceives us most delightfully.