oldiery, doing her
will upon themselves. Of her originally sprang the inspired teaching of
the doom of men to excruciation in endlessness. She is the fountain of
the infinite ocean whereon the exceedingly sensitive soul is tumbled
everlastingly, with the diversion of hot pincers to appease its appetite
for change.

Dacier was never the best of sleepers. He had taken to exercise his
brains prematurely, not only in learning, but also in reflection; and a
reflectiveness that is indulged before we have a rigid mastery of the
emotions, or have slain them, is apt to make a young man more than
commonly a child of nerves: nearly as much so as the dissipated, with the
difference that they are hilarious while wasting their treasury, which he
is not; and he may recover under favouring conditions, which is a point
of vantage denied to them. Physically he had stout reserves, for he had
not disgraced the temple. His intemperateness lay in the craving to rise
and lead: a precocious ambition. This apparently modest young man started
with an aim--and if in the distance and with but a slingstone, like the
slender shepherd fronting the Philistine, all his energies were in his
aim--at Government. He had hung on the fringe of an Administration. His
party was out, and he hoped for higher station on its return to power.
Many perplexities were therefore buzzing about his head; among them at
present one sufficiently magnified and voracious to swallow the
remainder. He added force to the interrogation as to why that Bell should
sound its inhuman strokes twice, by asking himself why he was there to
hear it! A strange suspicion of a bewitchment might have enlightened him
if he had been a man accustomed to yield to the peculiar kind of sorcery
issuing from that sex. He rather despised the power of women over men:
and nevertheless he was there, listening to that Bell, instead of having
obeyed the call of his family duties, when the latter were urgent. He had
received letters at Lugano, summoning him home, before he set forth on
his present expedition. The noisy alarum told him he floundered in quags,
like a silly creature chasing a marsh-lamp. But was it so? Was it not, on
the contrary, a serious pursuit of the secret of a woman's
character?--Oh, a woman and her character! Ordinary women and their
characters might set to work to get what relationship and likeness they
could. They had no secret to allure. This one had: she had the secret of
lake wate