Chapter 2

sea, _that_ would have told you where she is to be found."

Spike stared at the speaker intently; and when her cracked voice ceased, his look was that of a man who was terrified as well as bewildered. This did not arise still from any gleamings of the real state of the case, but from the soreness with which his conscience pricked him, when he heard that his much-wronged wife was alive. He fancied, with a vivid and rapid glance at the probabilities, all that a woman abandoned would be likely to endure in the course of so many long and suffering years.

"Are you sure of what you say, Jack? You wouldn't take advantage of my situation to tell me an untruth?"

"As certain of it as of my own existence. I have seen her quite lately--talked with her of _you_--in short, she is now at Key West, knows your state, and has a wife's feelin's to come to your bed-side."

Notwithstanding all this, and the many gleamings he had had of the facts during their late intercourse on board the brig, Spike did not guess at the truth. He appeared astounded, and his terror seemed to increase.

"I have another thing to tell you," continued Jack, pausing but a moment to collect her own thoughts. "Jack Tier--the real Jack Tier--he who sailed with you of old, and whom you left ashore at the same time you desarted your wife, _did_ die of the fever, as you was told, in eight-and-forty hours a'ter the brig went to sea."

"Then who, in the name of Heaven, are you? How came you to hail by another's name as well as by another sex?"

"What could a woman do, whose husband had desarted her in a strange land?"

"That is remarkable! So _you_'ve been married? I should not have thought _that_ possible; and your husband desarted you, too. Well, such things _do_ happen." Jack now felt a severe pang. She could not but see that her ungainly--we had almost said her unearthly appearance--prevented the captain from even yet suspecting the truth; and the meaning of his language was not easily to be mistaken. That any one should have married _her_, seemed to her husband as improbable as it was probable he would run away from her as soon as it was in his power after the ceremony.

"Stephen Spike," resumed Jack, solemnly, "_I_ am Mary Swash--_I_ am your wife!"

Spike started in his bed; then he buried his face in the coverlet--and he actually groaned. In bitterness of spirit the woman turned away and wept. Her feelings had been blunted by misfortune and the collisions of a selfish world; but enough of former self remained to make this the hardest of all the blows she had ever received. Her husband, dying as he was, as he must and did know himself to be, shrunk from one of her appearance, unsexed as she had become by habits, and changed by years and suffering.

[_To be continued_.

AN HOUR.

BY J. BAYARD TAYLOR.

I've left the keen, cold winds to blow Around the summits bare; My sunny pathway to the sea Winds downward, green and fair, And bright-leaved branches toss and glow Upon the buoyant air!

The fern its fragrant plumage droops O'er mosses, crisp and gray, Where on the shaded crags I sit, Beside the cataract's spray, And watch the far-off, shining sails Go down the sunny bay!

I've left the wintry winds of life On barren hearts to blow-- The anguish and the gnawing care, The silent, shuddering wo! Across the balmy sea of dreams My spirit-barque shall go.

Learned not the breeze its fairy lore Where sweetest measures throng? A maiden sings, beside the stream, Some chorus, wild and long, Mingling and blending with its roar, Like rainbows turned to song!

I hear it, like a strain that sweeps The confines of a dream; Now fading into silent space, Now with a flashing gleam Of triumph, ringing through the deeps Of forest, dell and stream!

Away! away! I hear the horn Among the hills of Spain: The old, chivalric glory fires Her warrior-hearts again! Ho! how their banners light the morn, Along Grenada's plain!

I hear the hymns of holy faith The red Crusaders sang, And the silver horn of Ronçeval, That o'er the tecbir rang When prince and kaiser through the fray To the paladin's rescue sprang!

A beam of burning light I hold!-- My good Damascus brand, And the jet-black charger that I ride Was foaled in the Arab land, And a hundred horsemen, mailed in steel, Follow my bold command!

Through royal cities speeds our march-- The minster-bells are rung; The loud, rejoicing trumpets peal, The battle-flags are swung, And sweet, sweet lips of ladies praise The chieftain, brave and young.

And now, in bright Provençal bowers, A minstrel-knight am I: A gentle bosom on my own Throbs back its ecstasy; A cheek, as fair as the almond flowers, Thrills to my lips' reply!

I tread the fanes of wondrous Rome, Crowned with immortal bay, And myriads throng the Capitol To hear my lofty lay, While, sounding o'er the Tiber's foam, Their shoutings peal away!

Oh, triumph such as this were worth The poet's doom of pain, Whose hours are brazen on the earth, But golden in the brain: I close the starry gate of dreams, And walk the dust again!

POWER OF BEAUTY,

AND A PLAIN MAN'S LOVE.

BY N. P. WILLIS.

That the truths arrived at by the unaccredited short road of "magnetism" had better be stripped of their technical phraseology, and set down as the gradual discoveries of science and experience, is a policy upon which acts many a sagacious believer in "clairvoyance." Doubtless, too, there is, here and there, a wise man, who is glad enough to pierce, with the eyes of an incredible agent, the secrets about him, and let the world give him credit, by whatever name they please, for the superior knowledge of which he silently takes advantage. I should be behind the time, if I had not sounded to the utmost of my ability and opportunity the depth of this new medium. I have tried it on grave things and trifles. If the unveiling which I am about to record were of more use to myself than to others, perhaps I should adopt the policy of which I have just spoken, and give the result, simply as my own shrewd lesson learned in reading the female heart. But the truths I unfold will instruct the few who need and can appreciate them, while the whole subject is not of general importance enough to bring down cavilers upon the credibility of their source. I thus get rid of a very detestable though sometimes necessary evil, ("_qui nescit dissimulare nescit vivere_," says the Latin sage,) that of shining by any light that is not absolutely my own.

I am a very plain man in my personal appearance--_so_ plain that a common observer, if informed that there was a woman who had a fancy for my peculiar type, would wonder that I was not thankfully put to rest for life as a seeker after love--a second miracle of the kind being a very slender probability. It is not in beauty that the taste for beauty alone resides, however. In early youth my soul, like the mirror of Cydippe, retained, with enamored fidelity, the image of female loveliness copied in the clear truth of its appreciation, and the passion for it had become, insensibly, the thirst of my life, before I thought of it as more than an intoxicating study. To be loved--myself beloved--by a creature made in one of the diviner moulds of woman, was, however, a dream that shaped itself into waking distinctness at last, and from that hour I took up the clogging weight of personal disadvantages, to which I had hitherto unconsciously been chained, and bore it heavily in the race which the well-favored ran as eagerly as I.

I am not to recount, here, the varied experiences of my search, the world over, after beauty and its smile. It is a search on which all travelers are more than half bent, let them name as they please their professed errand in far countries. The coldest scholar in art will better remember a living face of a new cast of expression, met in the gallery of Florence, than the best work of Michael Angelo, whose genius he has crossed an ocean to study; and a fair shoulder crowded against the musical pilgrim, in the Capella Sistiera, will be taken surer into his soul's inner memory than the best outdoing of "the sky-lark taken up into heaven," by the ravishing reach of the _Miserere_. Is it not true?

There can hardly be now, I think, a style of female beauty of which I have not appreciated the meaning and comparative enchantment, nor a degree of that sometimes more effective thing than beauty itself--its expression breathing through features otherwise unlovely--that I have not approached near enough to weigh and store truthfully in remembrance. The taste forever refines in the study of woman. We return to what, with immature eye, we at first rejected; we intensify, immeasurably, our worship of the few who wear on their foreheads the star of supreme loveliness, confessed pure and perfect by all beholders alike; we detect it under surfaces which become transparent only with tenderness or enthusiasm; we separate the work of Nature's material chisel from the resistless and warm expansion of the soul swelling its proportions to fill out the shape it is to tenant hereafter. Led by the purest study of true beauty, the eager mind passes on from the shrine where it lingered to the next of whose greater brightness it becomes aware; and this is the secret of one kind of "inconstancy in love," which should be named apart from the variableness of those seekers of novelty, who, from unconscious self-contempt, value nothing they have had the power to win.

An unsuspected student of beauty, I passed years of loiterings in the living galleries of Europe and Asia, and, like self-punishing misers in all kinds of amassings, stored up boundlessly more than, with the best trained senses, I could have found the life to enjoy. Of course I had a first advantage, of dangerous facility, in my unhappy plainness of person--the alarm-guard that surrounds every beautiful woman in every country of the world--letting sleep at _my_ approach the cautionary reserve which presents bayonet so promptly to the good-looking. Even with my worship avowed, and the manifestation of grateful regard which a woman of fine quality always returns for elevated and unexacting admiration I was still left with such privilege of access as is granted to the family-gossip, or to an innocuous uncle, and it is of such a passion, rashly nurtured under this protection of an improbability, that I propose to tell the _inner_ story.