e wish of
his heart was doomed to expire disappointed, Sir Peter said aloud, "You
have not listened to what I said; Kenelm, you grieve me."

"Grieve you! you! do not say that, Father, dear Father. Listen to you!
Every word you have said has sunk into the deepest deep of my heart.
Pardon my foolish, purposeless snatch of talk to myself: it is but my
way, only my way, dear Father!"

"Boy, boy," cried Sir Peter, with tears in his voice, "if you could
get out of those odd ways of yours I should be so thankful. But if
you cannot, nothing you can do shall grieve me. Only, let me say this;
running waters have had a great charm for you. With a humble rill you
associate thoughts, dreams, memories in your past. But now you halt by
the stream of the mighty river: before you the senate of an empire wider
than Alexander's; behind you the market of a commerce to which that of
Tyre was a pitiful trade. Look farther down, those squalid hovels,
how much there to redeem or to remedy; and out of sight, but not very
distant, the nation's Walhalla, 'Victory or Westminster Abbey!' The
humble rill has witnessed your past. Has the mighty river no effect on
your future? The rill keeps no record of your past: shall the river
keep no record of your future? Ah, boy, boy, I see you are dreaming
still,--no use talking. Let us go home."

"I was not dreaming, I was telling myself that the time had come to
replace the old Kenelm with the new ideas, by a new Kenelm with the
Ideas of Old. Ah! perhaps we must,--at whatever cost to ourselves,--we
must go through the romance of life before we clearly detect what is
grand in its realities. I can no longer lament that I stand estranged
from the objects and pursuits of my race. I have learned how much I have
with them in common. I have known love; I have known sorrow."

Kenelm paused a moment, only a moment, then lifted the head which,
during that pause, had drooped, and stood erect at the full height of
his stature, startling his father by the change that had passed over his
face; lip, eye, his whole aspect, eloquent with a resolute enthusiasm,
too grave to be the flash of a passing moment.

"Ay, ay," he said, "Victory or Westminster Abbey! The world is a
battle-field in which the worst wounded are the deserters, stricken as
they seek to fly, and hushing the groans that would betray the secret of
their inglorious hiding-place. The pain of wounds received in the thick
of the fight is scarcely felt in the