a few drops of water on her forehead. She started and looked round.--I have been in a dream,--she said;--I feel as if all my strength were in this arm;--give me your hand!--She took my right hand in her left, which looked soft and white enough, but--Good Heaven! I believe she will crack my bones! All the nervous power in her body must have flashed through those muscles; as when a crazy lady snaps her iron window-bars,--she who could hardly glove herself when in her common health. Iris turned pale, and the tears came to her eyes;--she saw she had given pain. Then she trembled, and might have fallen but for me;--the poor little soul had been in one of those trances that belong to the spiritual pathology of higher natures, mostly those of women. To come back to this wondrous book of Iris. Two pages faced each other which I took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind. On the left hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked with a single bird. No trace of earth, but still the winged creature seemed to be soaring upward and upward. Facing it, one of those black dungeons such as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured. I am sure she must have seen those awful prisons of his, out of which the Opium-Eater got his nightmare vision, described by another as “cemeteries of departed greatness, where monstrous and forbidden things are crawling and twining their slimy convolutions among mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and mutilated inscriptions.” Such a black dungeon faced the page that held the blue sky and the single bird; at the bottom of it something was coiled,--what, and whether meant for dead or alive, my eyes could not make out. I told you the young girl's soul was in this book. As I turned over the last leaves I could not help starting. There were all sorts of faces among the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders that ran round the pages. They had mostly the outline of childish or womanly or manly beauty, without very distinct individuality. But at last it seemed to me that some of them were taking on a look not wholly unfamiliar to me; there were features that did not seem new.--Can it be so? Was there ever such innocence in a creature so full of life? She tells her heart's secrets as a three-years-old child betrays itself without need of being questioned! This was no common miss, such as are turned out in scores from the young-lady-factories, with parchments warranting them accomplished and virtuous,--in case anybody should question the fact. I began to understand her;--and what is so charming as to read the secret of a real femme incomprise?--for such there are, though they are not the ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.