I escaped from her arms, and ran home and seized the glasses and

bounded back again to Preciosa. As I entered the room I was heated, my

head was swimming with confused apprehension, my eyes must have

glared. Preciosa was frightened, and rising from her seat, stood with

an inquiring glance of surprise in her eyes. But I was bent with

frenzy upon my purpose. I was merely aware that she was in the room. I

saw nothing else. I heard nothing. I cared for nothing, but to see her

through that magic glass, and feel at once, all the fulness of

blissful perfection which that would reveal. Preciosa stood before the

mirror, but alarmed at my wild and eager movements, unable to

distinguish what I had in my hands, and seeing me raise them suddenly

to my face, she shrieked with terror, and fell fainting upon the

floor, at the very moment that I placed the glasses before my eyes,

and beheld--myself, reflected in the mirror, before which she had been

standing.

"Dear madam," cried Titbottom, to my wife, springing up and falling

back again in his chair, pale and trembling, while Prue ran to him and

took his hand, and I poured out a glass of water--"I saw myself."

There was silence for many minutes. Prue laid her hand gently upon the

head of our guest, whose eyes were closed, and who breathed softly,

like an infant in sleeping. Perhaps, in all the long years of anguish

since that hour, no tender hand had touched his brow, nor wiped away

the damps of a bitter sorrow. Perhaps the tender, maternal fingers of

my wife soothed his weary head with the conviction that he felt the

hand of his mother playing with the long hair of her boy in the soft

West Indian morning. Perhaps it was only the natural relief of

expressing a pent-up sorrow. When he spoke again, it was with the old,

subdued tone, and the air of quaint solemnity.

"These things were matters of long, long ago, and I came to this

country soon after. I brought with me, premature age, a past of

melancholy memories, and the magic spectacles. I had become their

slave. I had nothing more to fear. Having seen myself, I was compelled

to see others, properly to understand my relations to them. The lights

that cheer the future of other men had gone out for me. My eyes were

those of an exile turned backwards upon the receding shore, and not

forwards with hope upon the ocean. I mingled with men, but with little

pleasure. There are but many varieties of a few types. I did not find

those I came to clearer sighted than those I had left behind. I heard

men called shrewd and wise, and report said they were highly

Intelligent and successful. But when I looked at them through my

glasses, I found no halo of real manliness. My finest sense detected

no aroma of purity and principle; but I saw only a fungus that had

fattened and spread in a night. They all went to the theater to see

actors upon the stage. I went to see actors in the boxes, so

consummately cunning, that the others did not know they were acting,

and they did not suspect it themselves.

"Perhaps you wonder it did not make me misanthropical. My dear

friends, do not forget that I had seen myself. It made me

compassionate, not cynical. Of course I could not value highly the

ordinary standards of success and excellence. When I went to church

and saw a thin, blue, artificial flower, or a great sleepy cushion

expounding the beauty of holiness to pews full of eagles, half-eagles,

and threepences, however adroitly concealed in broadcloth and boots:

or saw an onion in an Easter bonnet weeping over the sins of Magdalen,