olled
the principal stream of traffic. It was pleasant to lose his own
identity in the vague sense of a manifold life, and yet at the same
time to bask in solitude. But, after a time, his enjoyment began to
pall. He turned back into the shade and walked slowly along the river
toward the neighborhood, where by passing through a few short side
streets, the zooelogical gardens may be reached. Here, too, it was
lonely at this noonday hour, and his old habit of strolling here and
there while thinking out a problem, had taught him all the paths in
which there was the least danger of meeting any one. But to-day he had
no desire to philosophize. On reaching his favorite spot, the
peninsula--not far from the marble statue of the king and the Louise
island, where a few weeks before he had developed his best thoughts for
the prize essay, he threw himself upon the grass in the dense shade of
the huge beeches and closed his eyes, that undisturbed he might devote
himself to his hopeless love dream.

Despite his twenty-nine years, his feelings were precisely similar to
those which fall to the lot of every one when attacked by his first
schoolboy love: the sensation of yielding to violence, of quite
forgetting self, and of being borne away on a flood-tide of passion, is
so strong and so delightful, that it swallows up all other emotions and
impulses, and the thought of possession, or even the desire for a
responsive feeling, can scarcely arise,--or, if at all, not in the
first stages, and in such a virgin soul as that of our philosopher. The
very unexpectedness, aimlessness, and unreasonableness of this event,
was to him, o'erwearied with arduous toil over abstruse thoughts, like
bathing in a shoreless sea, where, floating, he suffered the waves to
buoy him above the fathomless depths.

A hoarse hand-organ close by, which suddenly began to play the "Prince
of Arcadia," roused him rudely from the reverie in which time and place
were both forgotten. He sprang to his feet, and sought some escape from
the intrusive, soulless sounds. In a modest restaurant, where only a
few plain citizens were drinking coffee, he hurriedly ate his dinner,
and then as the seats were beginning to fill with afternoon guests, he
hastily departed, whither he did not himself know; he was only vaguely
conscious of a repugnance to appearing in broad daylight, in so
helpless a condition, before the brother to whom the preceding night he
had frankly confessed his s