I was of a timid disposition, and retiring nature, and so my acquaintances were few, and of close friends I had not one. My mornings and evenings were spent with my books, and in the afternoons I took solitary walks, often wandering out into the country, if the weather was fine, for the blue sky had a charm for me, and I loved to look at the distant hills,--the hazy and purple undulations which marked the horizon. And Nature was never the same to me. Always changing, always some beauty before undiscovered bursting on my sight, and her limitless halls were full of paintings and of songs of which I would never tire. Then, as evening closed in, and I would reluctantly turn back to my crowded quarters, the sordid streets and the cramped appearance of everything would fret me, and almost make me envious of the sparrow perched on the telegraph wire over my head. For he, at least, was lifted above this thoughtless, hurrying throng among which I was compelled to pass, and the piteous, supplicating voice of the blind beggar at the corner did not remind him that even thus he might some day become. And thus, when my feet brought me to the line of traffic, as I returned home, I would unconsciously hasten my steps, for the moil and toil of a city's strife I could not bear. In the spring of 1860, these long walks to the country became more frequent. I had been cooped up for four rigorous months, a predisposition to taking cold always before me as a warning that I must be careful in bad weather. And the confines of a fourteen by eighteen room naturally become irksome after weeks and weeks of intimate acquaintance. It is true there were two windows to my apartment. A glance from one only showed me the side of a house adjoining the one in which I stayed, but the other gave me a view of a thoroughfare, and by this window I sat through many a bleak winter day, watching the passers-by. One night there was a sleet, and when I looked out the next morning, everything was covered in a gray coat of ice. A young maple grew directly under my window, and its poor head was bent over as though in sorrow at the treatment it had to endure, and its branches hung listlessly in their icy case, with a frozen raindrop at the end of each twig. The sidewalks were treacherous, and I found some amusement in watching the pedestrians as they warily proceeded along the slippery pavement, most of them treading as though walking on egg-shells. There went an old gentleman who must have had business down town, for I had seen him pass every day. This morning he carried a stick in his hand, and I discovered that it was pointed with some sharp substance that would assist him, for every time he lifted it up, it left a little white spot in the coating of ice. There went a schoolboy, helter-skelter, swinging his books by a strap, running and sliding along the pavement in profound contempt for its dangers. A jaunty little Miss with fur wraps