--And these were they who gave us birth, The Pilgrims of the sunset wave, Who won for us this virgin earth, And freedom with the soil they gave. The pastor slumbers by the Rhine, --In alien earth the exiles lie, --Their nameless graves our holiest shrine, His words our noblest battle-cry! Still cry them, and the world shall hear, Ye dwellers by the storm-swept sea! Ye have not built by Haerlem Meer, Nor on the land-locked Zuyder-Zee! VIII There has been a sort of stillness in the atmosphere of our boarding-house since my last record, as if something or other were going on. There is no particular change that I can think of in the aspect of things; yet I have a feeling as if some game of life were quietly playing and strange forces were at work, underneath this smooth surface of every-day boardinghouse life, which would show themselves some fine morning or other in events, if not in catastrophes. I have been watchful, as I said I should be, but have little to tell as yet. You may laugh at me, and very likely think me foolishly fanciful to trouble myself about what is going on in a middling-class household like ours. Do as you like. But here is that terrible fact to begin with,--a beautiful young girl, with the blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to Nature's women, turned loose among live men. -Terrible fact? Very terrible. Nothing more so. Do you forget the angels who lost heaven for the daughters of men? Do you forget Helen, and the fair women who made mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was born? If jealousies that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,--if pangs that waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness or moping melancholy,--if assassination and suicide are dreadful possibilities, then there is always something frightful about a lovely young woman.--I love to look at this “Rainbow,” as her father used sometimes to call her, of ours. Handsome creature that she is in forms and colors,--the very picture, as it seems to me, of that “golden blonde” my friend whose book you read last year fell in love with when he was a boy, (as you remember, no doubt,)--handsome as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it is not her beauty alone that holds my eyes upon her. Let me tell you one of my fancies, and then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she has for me.