mentally. Wentworth, on the
contrary, had arrived--not at any place in particular, but at the spot
where he intended to remain. His ideas, and some of them had been rather
good ones at twenty-five, had suffered from their sedentary existence.
They had become rather stout. He called them progressive because in the
course of years he had perceived in them a slight glacier-like movement.
To others they appeared fixed.

Wentworth's attitude towards life, of which he was so fond of speaking,
was perhaps rather like that of a shrimper who, in ankle-deep water,
watches the heavily freighted whale boats come towering in. He does not
quite know why he, of all men, with his special equipment for the
purpose, and his expert handling of the net, does not also catch whales.
That they seldom swim in two-inch water does not occur to him. At last
he does not think there are any whales. He has exploded that fallacy.
For, in a moment of adventurous enthusiasm, counting not the cost, did
he not once wade recklessly up to his very shoulders in deep water: _and
there were no whales_,--only pinching crabs. Crabs were the one real
danger, the largest denizens of the boundless main, whatever his former
playmates the whalers might affirm.

When the shrimper and the whaler had dined together, and the Bishop had
heard with affectionate sympathy the little there was to hear
respecting Michael, and the conversation tended towards more general
topics, the radical antagonism between the two friends' minds threatened
every moment to make itself felt.

The Bishop tried politics somewhat tentatively, on which they had
sympathised in college days, but it seemed they had widely diverged
since. Wentworth, though he frequently asserted that no one enjoyed more
than he "the clashing of opposite opinions," seemed nevertheless only
able to welcome with cordiality a mild disagreement, just sufficiently
defined to prove stimulating to the expression of his own views. A wide
divergence from them he met with a chilly silence. He did so now. The
Bishop looked at his neat ankle, and changed the subject.

"Have you seen or heard anything of Everard Constable since he came into
his kingdom, such a very unexpected kingdom, too?"

"No. I fancy he is still abroad. But I can't say that for some time past
I have found Constable's aims in life very sympathetic. His unceasing
struggle after literary fame appears to me somewhat undignified."

"Oh! come. Give the devil h