theme
must be of love, and if you could improvise a stanza or two expressive
of the idea you just uttered I shall listen with yet more pleased
attention."

"Alas! I am no _improvisatore_. Yet I will avenge myself on your former
neglect of my craft by chanting to you a trifle somewhat in unison with
the thought you ask me to versify, but which you would not stay to hear
at Tor Hadham (though you did drop a shilling into Max's tray); it was
one of the songs I sang that evening, and it was not ill-received by my
humble audience.

"THE BEAUTY OF THE MISTRESS IS IN THE LOVER'S EYE.

"Is she not pretty, my Mabel May?
Nobody ever yet called her so.
Are not her lineaments faultless, say?
If I must answer you plainly, No.

"Joy to believe that the maid I love
None but myself as she is can see;
Joy that she steals from her heaven above,
And is only revealed on this earth to me!"

As soon as he had finished this very artless ditty, the minstrel rose
and said,--

"Now I must bid you good-by. My way lies through those meadows, and
yours no doubt along the high road."

"Not so. Permit me to accompany you. I have a lodging not far from
hence, to which the path through the fields is the shortest way."

The minstrel turned a somewhat surprised and somewhat inquisitive look
towards Kenelm. But feeling, perhaps, that having withheld from his
fellow-traveller all confidence as to his own name and attributes, he
had no right to ask any confidence from that gentleman not voluntarily
made to him, he courteously said "that he wished the way were longer,
since it would be so pleasantly halved," and strode forth at a brisk
pace.

The twilight was now closing into the brightness of a starry summer
night, and the solitude of the fields was unbroken. Both these men,
walking side by side, felt supremely happy. But happiness is like wine;
its effect differing with the differing temperaments on which it
acts. In this case garrulous and somewhat vaunting with the one man,
warm-coloured, sensuous, impressionable to the influences of external
Nature, as an Aeolian harp to the rise or fall of a passing wind; and,
with the other man, taciturn and somewhat modestly expressed, saturnine,
meditative, not indeed dull to the influences of external Nature, but
deeming them of no value, save where they passed out of the domain of
the sensuous into that of the intellectual, and the soul of man dictated
to the soul