MR. ELA'S STORY.
THREE or four years ago, my husband and I were making a winter voyage up the Oregon coast. The weather was not peculiarly bad: it was the ordinary winter weather, with a quartering wind, giving the ship an awkward motion over an obliquely-rolling sea. Cold, sick, thoroughly uncomfortable, with no refuge but the narrow and dimly-lighted state-room, I was reduced in the first twenty-four hours to a condition of ignominious helplessness, hardly willing to live, and not yet fully wishing or intending to die.
In this unhappy frame of mind the close of the second weary day found me, when my husband opened our state-room door to say that Mr. Ela, of ——, Oregon, was on board, and proposed to come and talk to me, in the hope of amusing me and making me forget my wretchedness. Submitting rather than agreeing to the proposal, chairs were brought and placed just inside the door-way, where the light of the saloon lamps shown athwart the countenance of my self-constituted physician. He was a young man, and looked younger than his years; slightly built, though possessing a supple, well-knit frame, with hands of an elegant shape, fine texture, and great expression. You saw at a glance that he had a poet's head, and a poet's sensitiveness of face; but it was only after observation that you saw how much the face was capable of which it did not convey, for faces are apt to indicate not so much individual culture as the culture of those with whom we are habitually associated. Mr. Ela's face clearly indicated to me the intellectual poverty, the want of æsthetic cultivation in his accustomed circle of society, at the same time that it suggested possible phases of great beauty, should it ever
