Oriental in personal appearance and physical tastes, he was still more so in disposition and mind, and in all that pertained to dreamery, philosophy and the affections. With this description of the principal personage of this narrative, I now proceed to sketch another part of the man. CHAPTER II. HIS EARLY DAYS--THE STRANGE LEGEND. And there sat the man at the side of the road--sat there mournfully, silently weeping--the strange man!--as if his heart would break, and not from slight cause was he sorrowing. Not from present want of food, shelter, or raiment, but because his heart was full, and its fountains overflowing. The world had called him a genius, and as such had petted, praised, admired, and starved him all at once; but not one grain of true sympathy all the while; not a single spark of true disinterested friendship. The great multitude had gathered about him as city sight-seers gather round the last new novelty in the museum--a child with two heads, a dog with two tails, or the Japanese mermaid--duly compounded of codfish and monkey--and then, satisfied with their inspection, they turned from, and left him in all his deep loneliness and misery, all the more bitter for the transient light of sympathy thrown momentarily upon him. Genius must be sympathetically treated, else it eats its own heart, and daily dies a painful, lingering death. Throwing aside all his theories about preëxistence, and triple life, as being too recondite for either my readers or myself, we come at once to his natural, matter-of-fact history. At eight years of age he had been christened in the Roman Catholic Church, by the name of Beverly. From his father our hero inherited little save a lofty spirit, an ambitious, restless nature, and a susceptibility to passional emotions, so great that it was a permanent and positive influence during his entire life. His fifth year began and completed the only school education the boy ever had, and for all his subsequent attainments in that direction he was indebted to his own unaided exertions. His father loved him little; his mother loved him as the apple of her eye--and all the more because being born with a full and complete set of teeth, old gossips and venerable grey-beards augured a strange and eventful career; beside which, certain singular spectral visitations and experiences of his mother, ere, and shortly after the young eyes opened on the world, convinced her that he was born to no common destiny--much of which has already been detailed at length in “Dhoula Bel: or the Magic Globe.” Two or three and twenty years prior to the opening of this tale, there lived at what then was No. 70 Canal street, New York city, a woman whose complexion was that of a Mississippi octoroon. She was a native of Vermont, had the reputation of being the most beautiful woman in the State, if indeed she was surpassed anywhere. Her mind was as rich in its