e that the Great Book shall be ready when your
wanderer returns and accounts for the missing talent."

And my father pished a little, and rubbed off the dew that bad gathered
on his spectacles. But I would not leave him in peace till he had given
me his word that the Great Book should go on a pas de great,--nay, till
I had seen him sit down to it with good heart, and the wheel went round
again in the quiet mechanism of that gentle life.

Finally, and as the culminating acme of my diplomacy, I effected the
purchase of the neighboring apothecary's practice and good-will for
Squills, upon terms which he willingly subscribed to; for the poor man
had pined at the loss of his favorite patients,--though Heaven knows
they did not add much to his income. And as for my father, there was no
man who diverted him more than Squills, though he accused him of being a
materialist, and set his whole spiritual pack of sages to worry and bark
at him, from Plato and Zeno to Reid and Abraham Tucker.

Thus, although I have very loosely intimated the flight of time, more
than a whole year elapsed from the date of our settlement at the Tower
and that fixed for my departure.

In the mean while, despite the rarity amongst us of that phenomenon,
a newspaper, we were not so utterly cut off from the sounds of the
far-booming world beyond, but what the intelligence of a change in the
Administration and the appointment of Mr. Trevanion to one of the great
offices of state reached our ears. I had kept up no correspondence with
Trevanion subsequent to the letter that occasioned Guy Belding's visit;
I wrote now to congratulate him: his reply was short and hurried.

An intelligence that startled me more, and more deeply moved my heart,
was conveyed to me, some three months or so before my departure, by
Trevanion's steward. The ill health of Lord Castleton had deferred his
marriage, intended originally to be celebrated as soon as he arrived of
age. He left the University with the honors of "a double-first class;"
and his constitution appeared to rally from the effects of studies more
severe to him than they might have been to a man of quicker and more
brilliant capacities, when a feverish cold, caught at a county meeting
in which his first public appearance was so creditable as fully to
justify the warmest hopes of his party, produced inflammation of
the lungs and ended fatally. The startling contrast forced on my
mind,--here, sudden death and cold cla