.

DISENCHANTED.
The poor girl had fallen humiliated from the alp she had scaled in search of her eagle's nest, into the mud of the swamp below, where (to use the poetic language of an author of our day) "after feeling the soles of her feet too tender to tread the broken glass of reality, Imagination--which in that delicate bosom united the whole of womanhood, from the violet-hidden reveries of a chaste young girl to the passionate desires of the sex--had led her into enchanted gardens where, oh, bitter sight! she now saw, springing from the ground, not the sublime flower of her fancy, but the hairy, twisted limbs of the black mandragora." Modeste suddenly found herself brought down from the mystic heights of her love to a straight, flat road bordered with ditches,--in short the work-day path of common life.

What ardent, aspiring soul would not have been bruised and broken by such a fall?
Whose feet were these at which she had shed her thoughts?
The Modeste who re-entered the Chalet was no more the Modeste who had left it two hours earlier than an actress in the street is like an actress on the boards.

She fell into a state of numb depression that was pitiful to see.

The sun was darkened, nature veiled itself, even the flowers no longer spoke to her.