and her feet when people got into the vehicle, and when they got out.  He then impressed on her the necessity in future life, when she grew up, of always having the price of her fare ready before it was wanted, to prevent unnecessary delay.  Having delivered himself of this good advice, he began to hum, keeping time by drumming with his thick Malacca cane.  He was still proceeding with this amusement—­producing some of the most acutely unmusical sounds I ever heard—­when the omnibus stopped to give admission to two ladies.  The first who got in was an elderly person—­pale and depressed—­evidently in delicate health.  The second was a young girl.

Among the workings of the hidden life within us which we may experience but cannot explain, are there any more remarkable than those mysterious moral influences constantly exercised, either for attraction or repulsion, by one human being over another?  In the simplest, as in the most important affairs of life, how startling, how irresistible is their power!  How often we feel and know, either pleasurably or painfully, that another is looking on us, before we have ascertained the fact with our own eyes!  How often we prophesy truly to ourselves the approach of a friend or enemy, just before either have really appeared!  How strangely and abruptly we become convinced, at a first introduction, that we shall secretly love this person and loathe that, before experience has guided us with a single fact in relation to their characters!

I have said that the two additional passengers who entered the vehicle in which I was riding, were, one of them, an elderly lady; the other, a young girl.  As soon as the latter had seated herself nearly opposite to me, by her companion’s side, I felt her influence on me directly—­an influence that I cannot describe—­an influence which I had never experienced in my life before, which I shall never experience again.

I had helped to hand her in, as she passed me; merely touching her arm for a moment.  But how the sense of that touch was prolonged!  I felt it thrilling through me—­thrilling in every nerve, in every pulsation of my fast-throbbing heart.

Had I the same influence over her?  Or was it I that received, and she that conferred, only?  I was yet destined to discover; but not then—­not for a long, long time.

Her veil was down when I first saw her.  Her features and her expression were but indistinctly visible to me.  I could just vaguely perceive that she was young and beautiful; but, beyond this, though I might imagine much, I could see little.

From the time when she entered the omnibus, I have no recollection of anything more that occurred in it.  I neither remember what passengers got out, or what passengers got in.  My powers of observation, hitherto active enough, had now wholly deserted me.  Strange! that the capricious rule of chance should sway the action of our faculties that a trifle should set in motion the whole complicated machinery of their exercise, and a trifle suspend it.