s Homer told it,
the cock replied scornfully, 'How could Homer know anything about it?
At that time he was a camel in Bactria.' Pisistratus, according to the
doctrine of metempsychosis you might have been a Bactrian camel when
that which to my life was the siege of Troy saw Roland and Trevanion
before the walls.

"Handsome you can see that Trevanion has been: but the beauty of his
countenance then was in its perpetual play, its intellectual eagerness;
and his conversation was so discursive, so various, so animated, and
above all so full of the things of the day! If he had been a priest of
Serapis for fifty years he could not have known the anaglyph better.
Therefore he filled up every crevice and pore of that hollow society
with his broken, inquisitive, petulant light; therefore he was admired,
talked of, listened to, and everybody said, 'Trevanion is a rising man.'

"Yet I did not do him then the justice I have done since; for we
students and abstract thinkers are apt too much, in our first youth, to
look to the depth, of a man's mind or knowledge, and not enough to the
surface it may cover. There may be more water in a flowing stream only
four feet deep, and certainly more force and more health, than in a
sullen pool thirty yards to the bottom. I did not do Trevanion justice;
I did not see how naturally he realized Lady Ellinor's ideal. I have
said that she was like many women in one. Trevanion was a thousand men
in one. He had learning to please her mind, eloquence to dazzle her
fancy, beauty to please her eye, reputation precisely of the kind
to allure her vanity, honor and conscientious purpose to satisfy her
judgment; and, above all, he was ambitious,--ambitious not as I, not as
Roland was, but ambitious as Ellinor was; ambitious, not to realize some
grand ideal in the silent heart, but to grasp the practical, positive
substances that lay without.

"Ellinor was a child of the great world, and so was he.

"I saw not all this, nor did Roland; and Trevanion seemed to pay no
particular court to Ellinor.

"But the time approached when I ought to speak. The house began to thin.
Lord Rainsforth had leisure to resume his easy conferences with me; and
one day, walking in his garden, he gave me the opportunity,--for I need
not say, Pisistratus," said my father, looking at me earnestly, "that
before any man of honor, if of inferior worldly pretensions, will open
his heart seriously to the daughter, it is his duty to spe