whole truth, I want you to help
me with my father.'

This last was said at the door as he showed me out.

In the afternoon we were nearing Bristol. It was a lovely day in
October. Andrew had been enjoying himself; but it was evidently rather
the pleasure of travelling in a first-class carriage like a gentleman
than any delight in the beauty of heaven and earth. The country was in
the rich sombre dress of decay.

'Is it not remarkable,' said my friend to me, 'that the older I grow, I
find autumn affecting me the more like spring?'

'I am thankful to say,' interposed Andrew, with a smile in which was
mingled a shade of superiority, 'that no change of the seasons ever
affects me.'

'Are you sure you are right in being thankful for that, father?' asked
his son.

His father gazed at him for a moment, seemed to bethink himself after
some feeble fashion or other, and rejoined,

'Well, I must confess I did feel a touch of the rheumatism this
morning.'

How I pitied Falconer! Would he ever see of the travail of his soul
in this man? But he only smiled a deep sweet smile, and seemed to be
thinking divine things in that great head of his.

At Bristol we went on board a small steamer, and at night were landed at
a little village on the coast of North Devon. The hotel to which we went
was on the steep bank of a tumultuous little river, which tumbled past
its foundation of rock, like a troop of watery horses galloping by with
ever-dissolving limbs. The elder Falconer retired almost as soon as we
had had supper. My friend and I lighted our pipes, and sat by the open
window, for although the autumn was so far advanced, the air here was
very mild. For some time we only listened to the sound of the waters.

'There are three things,' said Falconer at last, taking his pipe out
of his mouth with a smile, 'that give a peculiarly perfect feeling of
abandonment: the laughter of a child; a snake lying across a fallen
branch; and the rush of a stream like this beneath us, whose only
thought is to get to the sea.'

We did not talk much that night, however, but went soon to bed. None of
us slept well. We agreed in the morning that the noise of the stream
had been too much for us all, and that the place felt close and torpid.
Andrew complained that the ceaseless sound wearied him, and Robert that
he felt the aimless endlessness of it more than was good for him.
I confess it irritated me like an anodyne unable to soothe. We were
clea