Before ending this "scrap" I will quote some sentences written by a friend of my own long ago--a very eccentric man, and indeed a melancholy one. He had been crossed in love, and could rarely speak or write without recurring to the origin of his unhappiness. He had a great many faults, but he is dead now, and has been so for many years; I am not anxious to say any more about them. The paragraph which I copy from his manuscript, is a portion of a flighty book, the aim or meaning of which I could never discover. It owes its fanciful extravagance, I rather think, to the influence of opium upon the author's nerves. After pointing out the numerous particulars in which "nature imitates our women," he proceeds to observe after the following fashion, "In the hair, nature is most an imitator. The cascade caressing the precipice with the threads of its silver locks, which the teeth of the granite comb have frizled, and which the winds play at gambol with, is only a copy. So with the vine on the rock--the great vine whose metallic tendrils I have looked on and wondered at when the sunshine spanned them with a cloven halo. So with the drooping moss--the _Barba Espagna_, with its drapery of gold held by threads of spun alabaster, hanging in _hard_ festoons from the tree beside the Lagoon and sighing when its hues die with the sunlight. And so with the boughs of our weeping trees. O, but are not these last most beautiful? Place your ear to the soft grass-blades on the brink of a valley brook, and listen to the monotone of the willow's stirred ringlets, and watch them as the wind lifts them from the eddy beneath to float, bejewelled by adhering globules. And then look upon them as with the abating wind they sink lower and lower, leaving their cool rain upon your cheek. See them trail in the pebbly waters and conjure up in each detached leaf an Elfin barque laden with its rare boatmen and tiny beauties. Hear the tinkle of the little bells and the shrieks of the wrecked mariners, as they cling to the hair of the willow (as Zal clung to the locks of his mistress) and splash the brook into foam. And now they leap to the backs of their skipper steeds, and ply the spur of the thistle seed, and gallop off for the green shore, wringing their hands and bewailing the ill fate of their holiday trim. Such marvellous fancies, if you are fanciful, will prick your brain until the drowsy sough of the tree-hair and the renewed trickle of the raining spray lend your eyes sleep and call forth the dream spirit, as the fly from its cocoon, and give it the wings of wilder vagary to flutter away withal--whither? _Mine_ would return to my wanderings by Goluon with her whose tomb in the valley of sweet waters often pillows my head."