front, were bought with the pin that the signora gave to Sarah Jane, I am filled with profound respect for things that glitter. And when I look on the other side of the fire and see Jim smoking his pipe just as happy as anybody, then I say to myself that, if there are people who think that this story is too much out of the common, I wish they would step in here and talk to Jim about it. There is a fire in his eyes when he tells you how glad he is that it was the shark instead of him, that is very convincing.

A LION AND A LIONESS

BY JOAQUIN MILLER.

CHAPTER I.

I doubt if you will find either profit or pleasure in reading this incident of my third voyage up the Nile. It is really not worth reading. I have written it down merely for a few friends who know something of the facts; and also to escape the annoyance of having to tell it over as one of the features of my four years' travel in the Orient. But to begin. Wearying of the Levant, I was resting a time in Rome, when I was formally invited, as well as specially urged, to witness the marriage ceremony between the Grand Duchess Alexandria and the Duke of Edinburgh. Let us pass over these wasteful follies, the waste of time, the waste of sense, of soul! I have only mentioned the reason for my presence in St. Petersburg; have only mentioned the fact of my being there, because I saw a face in that gathering of people that could not be forgotten. It was the face of a tall, dark, and serenely silent Dolores; a young woman who had surely met and made the acquaintance of sorrow early in the morning of life. I sometimes wonder if I could ever have known or cared to know any one who had not sorrowed deeply. And yet I now know very well that, in whatever guise that woman could have come, there could have been no two roads for us from the day of her coming to the day of her going.

Let me be a little confidential right here. I knew, I had always known, I should meet this woman. I had waited for her; worked hard, built up the battlements and the fortress of my soul so that I might receive her into it; and defend her well against my baser self when she should come. And now tell me—have you never had a thought, a conviction like this? A certainty in your own heart that your other and better self would come to you complete and entire some day, soon or late, so soon as you might have the fortress ready? The doctors said she was dying. She had been trying to stand between the Czar and the Jews. She may not have been of that "peculiar people," but I think she had the money of 

 Prev. P 31/139 next