the
stony part, consist?"

He shook his head, and looked up mournfully in my face; there was a
pause of a few seconds. "You, Mr. Lindsay," he at length replied, "you
who are of an equable steady temperament, can know little, from
experience, of the unhappiness of the man who lives only in extremes,
who is either madly gay or miserably depressed. Try and realize the
feelings of one whose mind is like a broken harp--all the medium tones
gone, and only the higher and lower left; of one, too, whose
circumstances seem of a piece with his mind, who can enjoy the exercise
of his better powers, and yet can only live by the monotonous drudgery
of copying page after page in a clerk's office; of one who is
continually either groping his way amid a chill melancholy fog of
nervous depression, or carried headlong, by a wild gaiety, to all which
his better judgment would instruct him to avoid; of one who, when he
indulges most in the pride of superior intellect, cannot away with the
thought that that intellect is on the eve of breaking up, and that he
must yet rate infinitely lower in the scale of rationality than any of
the nameless thousands who carry on the ordinary concerns of life around
him."

I was grieved and astonished, and knew not what to answer. "You are in a
gloomy mood to-day," I at length said; "you are immersed in one of the
fogs you describe; and all the surrounding objects take a tinge of
darkness from the medium through which you survey them. Come, now, you
must make an exertion, and shake off your melancholy. I have told you
all my story, as I best could, and you must tell me all yours in
return."

"Well," he replied, "I shall, though it mayn't be the best way in the
world of dissipating my melancholy. I think I must have told you, when
at college, that I had a maternal uncle of considerable wealth, and, as
the world goes, respectability, who resided in Aberdeenshire. He was
placed on what one may term the table-land of society; and my poor
mother, whose recollections of him were limited to a period when there
is warmth in the feelings of the most ordinary minds, had hoped that he
would willingly exert his influence in my behalf. Much, doubtless,
depends on one's setting out in life; and it would have been something
to have been enabled to step into it from a level like that occupied by
my relative. I paid him a visit shortly after leaving college, and met
with apparent kindness. But I can see beyond the surfa