of his horse as he rode at
speed on the sward through the moonlight.

(1) "I have frequently," says Mr. Wilkinson, in his invaluable work upon
South Australia, at once so graphic and so practical, "been out on a
journey in such a night, and whilst allowing the horse his own time
to walk along the road, have solaced myself by reading in the still
moonlight."

CHAPTER III.

The weeks and the months rolled on, and the replies to Vivian's letters
came at last; I foreboded too well their purport. I knew that my father
could not set himself in opposition to the deliberate and cherished
desire of a man who had now arrived at the full strength of his
understanding, and must be left at liberty to make his own election
of the paths of life. Long after that date I saw Vivian's letter to
my father; and even his conversation had scarcely prepared me for the
pathos of that confession of a mind remarkable alike for its strength
and its weakness. If born in the age, or submitted to the influences,
of religious enthusiasm, here was a nature that, awaking from sin, could
not have been contented with the sober duties of mediocre goodness; that
would have plunged into the fiery depths of monkish fanaticism, wrestled
with the fiend in the hermitage, or marched barefoot on the infidel with
a sackcloth for armor,--the cross for a sword. Now, the impatient desire
for redemption took a more mundane direction, but with something that
seemed almost spiritual in its fervor. And this enthusiasm flowed
through strata of such profound melancholy! Deny it a vent, and it might
sicken into lethargy or fret itself into madness,--give it the vent, and
it might vivify and fertilize as it swept along.

My father's reply to this letter was what might be expected. It gently
reinforced the old lessons in the distinctions between aspirations
towards the perfecting ourselves,--aspirations that are never in
vain,--and the morbid passion for applause from others, which shifts
conscience from our own bosoms to the confused Babel of the crowd and
calls it "fame." But my father in his counsels did not seek to oppose
a mind so obstinately bent upon a single course,--he sought rather to
guide and strengthen it in the way it should go. The seas of human life
are wide. Wisdom may suggest the voyage, but it must first look to the
condition of the ship and the nature of the merchandise to exchange. Not
every vessel that sails from Tarshish can bring back the gol