was. The next day, I see, in
a chart in the village school-room, 'Laennec, inventor of the
stethoscope;' and, the day following, I find and read his biography
in a volume that I happen to take up to pass five minutes. And yet we
say 'by chance.'

"Or I come across an expression of which I haven't grasped the
precise meaning, 'gene,' let us say, or 'eclectic,' and the next day
I hear the rector and curate discussing them. These are real cases.

"Or I am interrupted in my writing by Edward, who takes the letters
to the post, and forces this from under my hand, as I write: not,
surely, only to spare you the receipt of a dull and immature letter.

"Arthur Hamilton."

I have only one other letter of any especial interest about this
date.

"If only a book could be written about a hermit, a man that
deliberately left the world, retiring, not to an impracticable
distance--let us say to a small farm, in a country village, with half
an acre of garden--and there let no sound from the world without
reach him, except incidentally, and lived a pure and uncontaminated
life, watching his garden, and turning over, very slowly, such
experience as he had gained in life, with the intention, if anything
came of it, of telling the world any solution that occurred to him
of the great question--'Is one bound to meet life in the ordinary
manner, by plunging into it and swimming up the stream, or does one
meet it best by abjuring it?' There is much to be said for both
views. I am not at all sure that these or similar lives are not
lived, and that the only practical bearing of them is that a man
is _not_ bound to tell his discoveries of our enigmas. I mean, I
can conceive a man, under such circumstances, reaching a very high
standpoint, arriving at very lofty knowledge of the problems of fate
and life, and at the same time finding a ban laid upon him, a tacit
[Greek: anagke], not to reveal it to others, it being hinted to
him that those who would attain to it at all must attain to it as he
has himself attained, by finding out the way themselves."

CHAPTER XII

About this time he made the acquaintance of some neighbours whom he
approved, and found companions for Edward Bruce in the boys of the
family, who were home for the holidays. The boy brightened up so much
under the new surroundings, that Arthur determined to get a boy of
the same age to educate with Edward, and he accordingly inserted an
advertisement in the _Times