Page:The Ladies' Cabinet of Fashion, Music & Romance 1832.pdf/15

Rh whole year's stock of eloquence has been frozen up by a Lapland winter, and suddenly set going by a spring thaw- lamented my shyness- and again shook her hand most emphatically, to corroborate my assertion, that I was the shyest man in the world. I think I may truly affirm, that I enjoyed more of actual existence in one hour after this recognition, than I had for the last fifteen years, and was swimming in the very bosom of Elysium, when, happening to look towards my merry friend, I caught him in the very act of laughing at me most inordinately. O reader, if thou art peradventure a bashful man, or, what is still more rare, a bashful woman, thou canst tell what it is to have the cold water of a mischievous laugh thrown upon the warm embers of a newly-awakened sentiment just lighting into a blaze. Like the traveller of the Swiss valleys, thou wilt find thyself, in one single moment, at one single step, transported from the region of flowers, fruits, and herbage, to the region of eternal ice-from the glowing embraces of laughing spring, to the withering grasp of frowning winter.

I was struck dumb, "and word spake never more" that night. My little play-mate, finding she could get nothing more out of me, changed her seat, and left me alone, howling -no, not howling -but lost in the silent wilderness of stupefaction, where I remained, to see, as I thought, my host and the lady making themselves right merry at my expense. I thought I could tell by the motion of their lips that they were talking of me; every word was a dagger, and every look a winged arrow tipt with poison. People may talk of the rack, the knout, the stake, the bed of Procrustes, and the vulture of Prometheus, but all these are nothing compared to the agonies of a sensitive, bashful man, when he thinks himself an object of laughter.

With a mortal effort, such as I never made before, and never shall again, I got up from my chair, made my bow, and rushed out of the room, in a paroxysm of wounded sensibility and unappeasable wrath. The next day my merry, pleasant friend came to see me, and inquire how I liked his party, and what I thought of my little school-mate. I was grim-horribly grim, mysterious, and incomprehensible ; I was too proud to acknowledge my wounds, or to do any thing more than hint at her being a giggling thing; I could not bear to see a woman always laughing, nor old friends that took such liberties with people as some people did. In short, I was as crusty as Will Waddle, after his half year's baking.

"Hey-day !" cried my merry friend, " which way does that