woke,
to feel that my being lived again, I knew that it was my youth and its
poet-land that were no more, and that I had passed, with an unconscious
step, which never could retrace its way, into the hard world of
laborious man!

PART XVI.

CHAPTER I.

"Please, sir, be this note for you?" asked the waiter.

"For me,--yes; it is my name."

I did not recognize the handwriting, and yet the note was from one whose
writing I had often seen. But formerly the writing was cramped, stiff,
perpendicular (a feigned hand, though I guessed not it was feigned);
now it was hasty, irregular, impatient, scarce a letter formed, scarce a
word that seemed finished, and yet strangely legible withal, as the hand
writing of a bold man almost always is. I opened the note listlessly,
and read,--

"I have watched for you all the morning. I saw her go. Well! I did
not throw myself under the hoofs of the horses. I write this in a
public-house, not far. Will you follow the bearer, and see once again
the outcast whom all the rest of the world will shun?"

Though I did not recognize the hand, there could be no doubt who was the
writer.

"The boy wants to know if there's an answer," said the waiter.

I nodded, took up my hat, and left the room. A ragged boy was standing
in the yard, and scarcely six words passed between us before I was
following him through a narrow lane that faced the inn and terminated
in a turnstile. Here the boy paused, and making me a sign to go on, went
back his way whistling. I passed the turnstile, and found myself in a
green field, with a row of stunted willows hanging over a narrow rill.
I looked round, and saw Vivian (as I intend still to call him) half
kneeling, and seemingly intent upon some object in the grass.

My eye followed his mechanically. A young unfledged bird that had left
the nest too soon stood, all still and alone, on the bare short sward,
its beak open as for food, its gaze fixed on us with a wistful stare.
Methought there was something in the forlorn bird that softened me more
to the forlorner youth, of whom it seemed a type.

"Now," said Vivian, speaking half to himself, half to me, "did the bird
fall from the nest, or leave the nest at its own wild whim? The parent
does not protect it. Mind, I say not it is the parent's fault,--perhaps
the fault is all with the wanderer. But, look you, though the parent is
not here, the foe is,--yonder, see!"

And the young man pointed to a larg