Little Poems in Prose

whose beauty has the penetrating magic of ru- ins. Her air was at once imperious and loose; and her eyes, although heavily ringed, were full of the force of fascination. What struck me most was the mystery of her voice, at whose sound I recalled both the most delicious con- tralto singers, and also a little of that hoarse- ness which characterizes the throats of very old drunkards. “Wilt though know my power?” cried the false goddess with her charming and paradoxi- cal voice; “Listen!” and she put to her mouth a gigantic trumpet covered with ribands like the reed-pipe, on which were written the titles of all the newspapers in the world, and through this trumpet she cried my name, which thus rolled across space with the noise of a hundred thousand thunders, and came back to me on the echo of the most distant of the planets. “The Devil!” cried I, half conquered, “there is a precious thing!” But, in examining more closely the seductive Amazon, it seemed to me vaguely that I remembered having seen her drinking with some fools of my acquaintance, and the raucous sounds of the brass bore to my ears I know not what remembrance of a venal trumpet.