lips and wide-open dreary eyes.

Ah, for youth's happiness! Alas for its dismal woe! Thus she came into
my life.

CHAPTER III

THE MUSIC OF THE WORLD

If a philosopher, learned in the human mind as Flamsteed in the courses
of the stars or the great Newton in the laws of external nature, were to
take one possessed by a strong passion of love or a bitter grief, or
what overpowering emotion you will, and were to consider impartially and
with cold precision what share of his time was in reality occupied by
the thing which, as we are in the habit of saying, filled his thoughts
or swayed his life or mastered his intellect, the world might well smile
(and to my thinking had better smile than weep) at the issue of the
investigation. When the first brief shock was gone, how few out of the
solid twenty-four would be the hours claimed by the despot, however much
the poets might call him insatiable. There is sleeping, and meat and
drink, the putting on and off of raiment and the buying of it. If a man
be of sound body, there is his sport; if he be sane, there are the
interests of this life and provision for the next. And if he be young,
there is nature's own joy in living, which with a patient scornful smile
sets aside his protest that he is vowed to misery, and makes him,
willy-nilly, laugh and sing. So that, if he do not drown himself in a
week and thereby balk the inquiry, it is odds that he will compose
himself in a month, and by the end of a year will carry no more marks of
his misfortune than (if he be a man of good heart) an added sobriety and
tenderness of spirit. Yet all this does not hinder the thing from
returning, on occasion given.

In my own case--and, if my story be followed to its close, I am
persuaded that I shall not be held to be one who took the disease of
love more lightly than my fellows--this process of convalescence, most
salutary, yet in a sense humiliating, was aided by a train of
circumstances, in which my mother saw the favour of Heaven to our family
and the Vicar the working of Betty Nasroth's prophecy. An uncle of my
mother's had some forty years ago established a manufactory of wool at
Norwich, and having kept always before his eyes the truth that men must
be clothed, howsoever they may think on matters of Church and State, and
that it is a cloth-weaver's business to clothe them and not to think for
them, had lived a quiet life through all the disturbances and had
prospered greatly in hi