tion of a Gothic buttress--these were the absorbing
questions of his youth, with now and then a lighter moment spent in
analytical consideration of the extra-mural decorations of St. Mark's.
The world buzzed along after its own fashion, not disturbing him, and
his absorptions permitted only a faint consciousness of the despair of
his relatives regarding his mind. Arrived at middle-age, and a little
more, he found himself alone in the world (though, for that matter, he
had always been alone and never of the world), and there was plenty of
money for him with various bankers who appeared to know about looking
after it. Returning to the town of his nativity after sundry expeditions
in Syria--upon which he had been accompanied by dusky gentlemen with
pickaxes and curly, long-barrelled muskets--he met, and was married by,
a lady who was ambitious, and who saw in him (probably as a fulfilment
of another Kismetic punishment) a power of learning and a destined
success. Not long after the birth of their only child, a daughter,
he was "called to fill the chair" of archaeology in a newly founded
university; one of the kind which a State and a millionaire combine to
purchase ready-made. This one was handed down off the shelf in a more or
less chaotic condition, and for a period of years betrayed considerable
doubt as to its own intentions, undecided whether they were classical
or technical; and in the settlement of that doubt lay the secret of the
past of the one man in Plattville so unhappy as to possess a past. From
that settlement and his own preceding action resulted his downfall,
his disgrace with his wife's relatives, the loss of his wife, the rage,
surprise, and anguish of her sister, Martha, and Martha's husband, Henry
Sherwood, and the separation from his little daughter, which was by
far to him the hardest to bear. For Fisbee, in his own way, and without
consulting anybody--it never occurred to him, and he was supposed often
to forget that he had a wife and child--had informally turned over to
the university all the money which the banks had kindly taken care of,
and had given it to equip an expedition which never expedited. A new
president of the institution was installed; he talked to the trustees;
they met, and elected to become modern and practical and technical; they
abolished the course in fine arts, which abolished Fisbee's connection
with them, and they then employed his money to erect a building for the
mechanical e