ility has achieved no position at all beyond that which the
accident of birth might assign to him.

"Yes," said the minstrel, with a half-suppressed sigh, "the last year
of my vagrant holidays has come to its close. I recollect that the first
day we met by the road-side fountain, I advised you to do like me, seek
amusement and adventure as a foot-traveller. Now, seeing you, evidently
a gentleman by education and birth, still a foot-traveller, I feel as if
I ought to say, 'You have had enough of such experience: vagabond life
has its perils as well as charms; cease it, and settle down.'"

"I think of doing so," replied Kenelm, laconically.

"In a profession?--army, law, medicine?"

"No."

"Ah, in marriage then. Right; give me your hand on that. So a petticoat
indeed has at last found its charm for you in the actual world as well
as on the canvas of a picture?"

"I conclude," said Kenelm, evading any direct notice of that playful
taunt, "I conclude from your remark that it is in marriage _you_ are
about to settle down."

"Ay, could I have done so before I should have been saved from many
errors, and been many years nearer to the goal which dazzled my sight
through the haze of my boyish dreams."

"What is that goal,--the grave?"

"The grave! That which allows of no grave,--fame."

"I see--despite of what you just now said--you still mean to go through
the world seeking a poet's fame."

"Alas! I resign that fancy," said the minstrel, with another half-sigh.
"It was not indeed wholly, but in great part the hope of the poet's fame
that made me a truant in the way to that which destiny, and such few
gifts as Nature conceded to me, marked out for my proper and only goal.
But what a strange, delusive Will-o'-the-Wisp the love of verse-making
is! How rarely a man of good sense deceives himself as to other things
for which he is fitted, in which he can succeed; but let him once drink
into his being the charm of verse-making, how the glamour of the charm
bewitches his understanding! how long it is before he can believe that
the world will not take his word for it, when he cries out to sun, moon,
and stars, 'I, too, am a poet.' And with what agonies, as if at the
wrench of soul from life, he resigns himself at last to the conviction
that whether he or the world be right, it comes to the same thing. Who
can plead his cause before a court that will not give him a hearing?"

It was with an emotion so passionately strong,