appeared tarnished to me. With a view to brightly polishing it, I breathed upon it in the usual manner. My pulse ceased its beating, my heart trembled with delight and dismay. Delight and dismay! Yes, thus I must describe the emotion that overpowered me, as, when my breath fell upon the mirror, I beheld in a bluish mist the lovely face that had looked upon me with that sorrowful, heart-penetrating glance!—You laugh?—Denounce me, believe me an incurable dreamer! But say and think what you will—it is enough—the fair one gazed upon me from the mirror, and as soon as the breath disappeared her face vanished in the darkness of the glass. "But I will not weary you, I will not tell all that came of this. Only this much will I say, that I again and again renewed my experiments with the mirror, that I was often successful in calling forth by my breath the picture I so loved, but that oftentimes my most strenuous efforts were in vain.... I lived only in the thought of her; all else was dead to me; I neglected my friends and my studies.... Often when that picture grew pale and wan, a physical indisposition seized me, the figure came forth as never before with such life-like reality and brilliancy that I almost fancied I could seize it. And then it seemed to my horror that I myself was the figure, veiled and encompassed by the mists of the glass. A sharp pain in my breast and then total apathy terminated this torturing condition, which invariably left me exhausted, and shaken to my inmost core. In these moments every attempt with the mirror miscarried; but when I had become strengthened, and the picture appeared again from the mirror in life-like form, I cannot indeed deny that a peculiar physical charm otherwise foreign to me was united with it...."