be learnt, in earliest youth."

'"What makes you know that my chief passion is love of Nature?" I
asked.

'"It was," he said, "the one thing you showed during your
illness--during your unconscious condition."

'"And yet I remember nothing of that time," I said. "This gives me an
opportunity of asking you something--an opportunity which I had
determined to make for myself before another day went by."

'"And what is that?" he said, in a tone that betrayed some
uneasiness.

'"You have told me how I came here. I now want you to tell me, too,
what was my condition when I came and what was my course of life
during all this long period. How did the time pass? What did I do? I
remember nothing."

'"I am glad you are asking me these questions," he said, "for I
believe that the more fully and more exactly I answer them, the
better for you and the better for me. Victor Hugo, in one of his
romances, speaks of the pensive somnambulism of the animals.
'Somnambulism,' sometimes pensive and sometimes playful, is the
very phrase I should use in characterising your condition when you
first came here and down to your recovery from that strange illness.
But this somnambulism would every now and then change and pass into
a consciousness which I can only compare with that of a child. But
no child that I have ever seen was so bewitchingly child-like as you
were. It was this that made your presence such a priceless boon to
me."

'"Priceless boon, Mr. D'Arcy!" I said. "How could such a being as you
describe be a priceless boon to any one?"

'"I will tell you," he replied. "Even before that great sorrow which
has made me the loneliest man upon the earth--even in the days when
my animal spirits were considered at times almost boisterous, I was
always at intervals subject to periods of great depression, or
rather, I should say, to periods of _ennui_. I must either be
painting or reading or writing. I had not the precious faculty of
being able on occasions to sit and let the rich waters of life flow
over me. I would yearn for amusement, and search in vain for some
object to amuse me. When you first came I was deeply interested in so
extraordinary a case as yours; and after a while, when the acuteness
of my curiosity and the poignancy of my sympathy for you had abated,
you became to me a joy, as a child is a joy in the eyes of its
parents."

'"Then your interest in me," I said, with a smile, "was that which
you would feel towards a pup