is time this mad infatuation was at an end," said I to myself one morning as I sat down to write a letter. "There is no hope of my ever seeing her again, and I am but frittering away the best emotions of my life in thus indulging in a dream that is not the prelude to a reality." But in spite of the wise determination thus made, I soon found my thoughts recurring to their old channel, and seized with sudden impatience at my evident weakness, took up the letter I had been writing and was about to read it, when to my great amazement I perceived that instead of inditing the usual words of a business communication, I had been engaged in scribbling a certain number up and down the page and even across the bottom where my signature should have been.
"Am I a fool?" I exclaimed, and was about to tear the sheet in two, when glancing again at the number, which was a simple thirty-six, I asked myself where I had got those especial figures. Instantly there arose before my mind's eye the vision of a brown-stone front with its vestibule and door. It was, then, the number of a house; but what house? a chateau en Espagne or a bona fide New York dwelling, which for some reason had unconsciously impressed itself upon my memory? I could not answer. There on the page was the number thirty-six, and equally plain in my mind was the look of the brown-stone front to which that number belonged—and that was all.
But it was enough to awaken within me the spirit of inquiry. The few houses thus numbered in that quarter of the city where I had lately been, were not so hard to find but that a morning given to the business ought to satisfy me whether the vision in my mind had its basis in reality. Taking a cab, I rode up town and into that region of streets I had traversed so carefully a week before. For I was assured that if the impression had been made by an actual dwelling it had been done at that time. Following the same course I then took, I consulted the appearance of the various houses to which that number was assigned. The first was built of brick; that was not it. The next one had pillars to the vestibule; and that was not it. The third, to use an Irish bull, was no house at all, but a stable, while the fourth was an elegant structure of much more pretension than the plain and simple front I had in my mind or memory. I was about to utter a curse upon my folly and go home, when I remembered there was yet a street or two taken in my zig-zag course of the week before, which I had not yet tested. "Might as well be thorough," I muttered, and bade my driver proceed down —— Street.
What was there in its aspect that dimly excited me at the first glance? A dim remembrance, a certain ghostly assurance that we had reached the right spot? As we neared the number I sought, I could not suppress an exclamation of surprise. For there before me to its last detail, stood the house which involuntarily presented itself to my mind, when my eye first fell upon that mysterious number scribbled at the foot of the page I was writing.
It was, then, no chimera of an overwrought brain, this vision of a house-front which had been haunting me, but a distinct remembrance of an actual dwelling seen by me in my former journey through this street. But why this house-front above all others; what was there in it to make such an impression? Looking at it I could not determine, but after we had passed, something, I cannot tell what, brought back another remembrance, trivial in itself, but yet a link in the chain that was destined sooner or later to lead me out of the maze into which I had stumbled. It was merely this; that as I rode along the streets on that memorable morning, searching for that mark on the curbstone from which I hoped so much, I had come upon a spot where the pavement had been freshly washed. With that unconscious action of the brain with which we are familiar, I looked at the sidewalk a moment, running even then with the water that had been cast upon it, and then gave a quick glance at the house. That glance, account for it as you will, took in the picture before it as the camera catches the impression of a likeness, and though in another instant I had forgotten the whole occurrence, it needed but a certain train of thought or perhaps a certain state of emotion to revive it again.
A noble cause for such an act of unconscious cerebration you will say, a freshly washed pavement: Le jeu ne faut pas la chandelle. And so I thought too, or would have thought if I had not been so interested in the pursuit in which I was engaged, and if the idea had not suggested itself that water and a broom might obliterate chalk-marks from curbstones, and that the imps that preside over our mental forces would not indulge in such a trick at my expense unless the play was worth the candle. At all events, from the moment I made this discovery, I fixed my faith on that house as the one which held the object of my search, and though I contented myself with merely noting the number of the street as we left it, I none the less determined to pursue my investigations, till I had learned beyond the possibility of a doubt whether my conjectures were not true.
A perseverance worthy of a better cause you will say, but you are no longer twenty-five and under the influence of your first passion. I own I was astonished at myself and frequently paused in the pursuit I had undertaken, to ask if I were the same person who but a fortnight before laughed at the story of a man who had gone mad over the body of an unknown woman he had saved from a wreck only to find her dead in his arms.
The first thing I did was to ascertain the name of the gentleman occupying the house I have specified. It was that of one of our wealthiest and most respectable bankers, a name as well known in the city—as your own for instance. This was somewhat disconcerting, but with a dogged resolution somewhat foreign to my natural disposition, I persevered in my investigations, and learning in the next breath that the gentleman alluded to was a widower with an only child, a young daughter of about sixteen or so, recovered my assurance, though not my equanimity. Seeking out my friend Farrar, who as you know is a walking gazette of New York society, I broached the subject of Mr.—excuse me if I do not mention his name; allow me to say, Preston's domestic affairs, and learned that Miss Preston, "A naive little piece for so great an heiress," I remember Farrar called her, had left town within a day or two for a visit to some friends in Baltimore. "I happen to know," said he with that careless sweep of his hand at which you have so often laughed, "because my friend Miss Forsyth met her at the depot. She was intending to be gone—two weeks, I think she said. Do you know her?"
That last question sprung upon me unawares, and I am afraid I blushed. "No," I returned, "I have not that honor but an acquaintance of mine has—well—has met her and—"
"I see, I see," broke in Farrar with his most disagreeable smile. Then with a short laugh, meant to act as a warning, I suppose, added as he walked off, "I hope your friend is in fair circumstances and not connected with the fine arts. Music is Mr. Preston's detestation, while Miss Preston though too young to be much sought after yet, will in two years' time have the pick of the city at her command."
"So!" thought I to myself; "my little innocent charmer is an embryo aristocrat, eh? Well then, I was a greater fool than I imagined." And I walked out of the hotel where I had met Farrar, with the very sensible conclusion to drop a subject that promised nothing but disappointment.
But the fates were against me, or the good angels perhaps, and at the next comer I met an old acquaintance, the very opposite of Farrar in character, who with a long love story of his own fired, my imagination to such an extent that in spite of myself I turned down —— Street, and was proceeding to pass her house, when suddenly the thought struck me, "How do I know that this unapproachable daughter of one of our most prominent citizens is one and the same person with my dainty little charmer? Widowers with young daughters are not so rare in this great city that I need consider the question as decided, because by a half superstitious freak of my own I have settled upon this house as the one I was in the other night. My inamorata may be the offspring of a musician for all I know." And inflamed at the thought of this possibility—I remembered the piano, you see—I gave to the winds all my fine resolutions and only asked how I could determine for once and all, whether I had ever crossed the threshold of the house before me. Some men would have run up the stoop, rung the bell and asked to see Mr. Preston on some pretended business he could easily conjure up to suit the occasion, but my face is too well known for me to risk any such attempt, besides I was too anxious to win the confidence of the young girl to shock her awakened sense of propriety by seeming to seek her where she did not wish to be found. And yet I must enter
