Volume I Part 3 (2/2)

”How can you tell?” I protested

”Why, I feel it;--I am quite sure of it But wait here a rapher, and I shall ask hiht, he went in Alas! the riddle was not to be solved so quickly as we had hoped The owner of the picture said that he did not knohose portrait it was He had bought it, with a nuraphs,” froraphic wares It had been taken in Paris; but the card upon which it was now rapher

Now land had been broken before I was born;--he knew the e peoples, but had long ceased to feel any interest in the life of the mother country For that reason, probably, the picture proved not less of a riddle to hi man who had never left his native state; and his stock-in-trade had been obtained, of course, through an agency As for myself, I was hopelessly separated, by iron circumstances, from that ordered society which seeks its pleasures in art and ht I have learned the na who had cast that shadow! Butyears went by before I learned it

I had then forgotten all about the picture I was in a Southern city, hundreds ofon the counter of a druggist's shop, talking to the druggist, when I suddenly perceived, in a glass case at raph It had been pasted, as a label, on the lid of soh all ht that I had felt as a boy, at the door of that photographer

”Excuseyou a moment,” I exclaiist glanced at the photograph, and then smiled--as people smile at silly questions

”Is it possible that you do not know?” he responded

”I do not,” I said ”Years ago I saw that photograph and I could not find out whose picture it was”

”You are joking!”

”Really I am not,” I said;--”and I very much want to know”

Then he told edienne At once flashed back to me the e blood there_” After all, he was right! In the veins of that wonderful wos

What drove him at the end of the two years to endeavour to reach Cincinnati, Ohio, is not clear The only light to be gathered upon the subject is froests that he rant train and had not money for food upon the way After thirty years, the clearest e was of the distress of being s The record of it bears the title of

MY FIRST ROMANCE

There has been sent to me, across the world, a little book stamped, on its yellow cover, with na of storht of those names, worthy of Frost-Giants, evokes the vision of a face,--siination, with legends and stories of the North--especially, I think, with the wonderful stories of Bjornstjerne Bjornson

It is the face of a Norwegian peasant-girl of nineteen su She wears her national costuht braided hair is tied with a blue ribbon She is tall; and there is an appearance of strong grace about her, for which I can find no word Her name I never learned, and never shall be able to learn;--and now it does not randchildren not a few But for me she will always be the maiden of nineteen summers,--fair and fresh frohter of Gods and Vikings Fro her I wanted to die for her; and I dreamed of _Valkyrja_ and of _Vala_-maids, of _Freyja_ and of _Gerda_

--She is seated, facing me, in an American railroad-car,--a third-class car, full of people whose foruishably dim in memory She alone remains luminous, vivid: the rest have faded into shadow,--all except abeside me, whose dark Jewish face, hoh theon our right she watches the strange neorld through which we are passing: there is a tre beneath us, and a rhythm of thunder, while the train sways like a shi+p in a storrant-train it is; and she, and I, and all those dih days and nights that seee,--over distances that are ht is of a summer day; and shadows slant to the east

The man beside oes to Redwing, Minnesota You like her very irl I think you wish that you were also going to Redwing, Minnesota?”

I do not answer I ary that he should knohat I wish And it is very rude of him, I think, to let me know that he knows

Mischievously, he continues:--

”If you like her so much, why don't you talk to her? Tell me what you would like to say to her; and I'll interpret for you Bah! you irls!”