scintillated a light peculiarly its own. Whoever saw him then never forgot the sight, for he seemed to have the power of glancing instantaneously through the world—Time, space—everything and everywhere. Judging by his speech alone, one would have thought his education might not have been altogether neglected, but that it certainly was of a kind and quality entirely different from that usually received in Christian lands. There was very little, if any, polish about him—not that he lacked urbanity, courteousness or smoothness—not that he was rude or rough in any way, but his placidity was that of the river, forest or lake, not that of the boudoir or the schools of politesse. He was extremely enigmatical, and the most so when he appeared most frank in all that pertained to his inner life and world; and was more sphynx-like to me at the end of ten years’ intimacy than on the first day of our acquaintance. He had, though poor, travelled extensively. Oriental in personal appearance and physical tastes, he was still more so in disposition and mind, and in all that pertained to dreamery, philosophy and the affections.

With this description of the principal personage of this narrative, I now proceed to sketch another part of the man.

CHAPTER II.
his early days—the strange legend.

And there sat the man at the side of the road—sat there mournfully, silently weeping—the strange man!—as if his heart would break, and not from slight cause was he sorrowing. Not from present want of food, shelter, or raiment, but because his heart was full, and its fountains overflowing. The world had called him a genius, and as such had petted, praised, admired, and starved him all at once; but not one grain of true sympathy all the while; not a single spark of true disinterested friendship. The great multitude had gathered about him as city sight-seers gather round the last new novelty in the museum—a child with two heads, a dog with two tails, or the Japanese mermaid—duly compounded of codfish and monkey—and then, satisfied with their inspection, they turned from, and left him in all his deep loneliness and misery, all the more bitter for the transient light of sympathy thrown momentarily upon him. Genius must be sympathetically treated, else it eats its own heart, and daily dies a painful, lingering death.

Throwing aside all his theories about preëxistence, and triple life, as being too recondite for either my readers or myself, we come at once to his natural, matter-of-fact history. At eight years of age he had been christened in the Roman Catholic Church, by the name of Beverly. From his father our hero inherited little save a lofty spirit, an ambitious, restless nature, and a susceptibility to passional emotions, so great that it was a permanent and positive influence during his entire life. His fifth year began and completed the only school education the boy ever had, and for all his subsequent attainments in that direction he was indebted to his own unaided exertions. His father loved him little; his mother loved him as the apple of her eye—and all the more because being born with a full and complete set of teeth, old gossips and venerable grey-beards augured a strange and eventful career; beside which, certain singular spectral visitations and experiences of his mother, ere, and shortly after the young eyes opened on the world, convinced her that he was born to no common destiny—much of which has already been detailed at length in “Dhoula Bel: or the Magic Globe.” Two or three and twenty years prior to the opening of this tale, there lived at what then was No. 70 Canal street, New York city, a woman whose complexion was that of a Mississippi octoroon. She was a native of Vermont, had the reputation of being the most beautiful woman in the State, if indeed she was surpassed anywhere. Her mind was as rich in its stores and resources as her person was in feminine graces. Her life up to that time had been a checkered, and in the main, a very unhappy one, for her refinement, nature, education, character and acquirements, were such as to demand a broader, higher, better social sphere than what, from pecuniary want, she now occupied and moved in. Another cause of unrest was that she was maritally mismatched altogether, for her husband, after years of absence, during which she had deemed him dead, and contracted a second alliance with the father of her boy, had suddenly returned, and never from that moment did she receive one particle of what her heart yearned for—that domestic love and sympathy, ever the matron’s due, and which alone can render life a blessing, and smooth the rugged, thorny pathway to the tomb.

Flora Beverly claimed immediate kindred with the red-skinned sons of the northern wilderness, but that blood in her veins mingled with the finer current derived from her ancestor, the Cid—a strain of royal blood that in the foretime had nerved noble-souled men to deeds of valor, and fired the souls of Spanish poets to lofty achievements in the rosy fields of immortal song. She had been tenderly reared—perhaps too much so—for her strange and wonderful beauty, flashing out upon the world from her large and lustrous eyes, and beaming forth from every feature and movement, had been such that she had become marked in community from early childhood, and her parents, looking upon her as a special providence to them, had unwisely cultured qualities in her that had better have been held in abeyance. By over-care and morbid solicitude they had nearly spoiled God’s handiwork, and she grew up an imperious, self-willed, exacting, and sensitive queen. She married, and expected to find herself the centre of a realm of unalloyed joy and delight, wherein her reign would be undisputed. The man she wedded took her for her beauty, expecting to realize a perfect heaven in its possession. Both were bitterly disappointed. The man could appreciate only the external and superficial qualities and excellences of his wife, while her inner, higher, better self—her soul, was a terra incognita to him, which, like so many other husbands, he never even once dreamed of exploring; he had no idea whatever of the inestimable qualities of her heart, intellect, or spirit, and he had never found out that her body is the least a woman gives away—that she has gifts so regal for the man she loves, that glittering diamonds are sparkless, insipid, valueless in comparison.

And so, the first delirious joy-month over, they both began to awaken—the man to the fact that to him his wife was a “very pretty doll,” the woman that her husband was—a brute, whose soul slept soundly beneath the coverlets of sense, and herself its victim and minister. It was horrible; she lost heart, she despised this surface man, and sunk and lost bloom beneath the terrible weight of the discovery and its fearful results. Married, she had expected to move in a sphere very far above that which, by the laws of moral and mental gravity, she was compelled to occupy. Her horizon was henceforth to be bounded by that of her master and his associates. Her husband was vain of his conquest, and one of his greatest joys was found in parading and showing off her beauty to the best advantage, like a jockey does a fine horse—and feeling, jockey-like the while, “all this is mine!” Neither himself nor his associates in life could appreciate that more than royal loveliness which dwells within the breasts of educated and refined women—a beauty which