im; he could not sleep, and he
could not eat; he would then go out and walk for miles and miles, until
he was thoroughly exhausted. It was a wonder that his mind did not give
way altogether. His sanity hung upon a thread.

It was in this state that he found himself one day upon a Rhine boat,
bound for Mainz. He had a very vague notion of how he had managed to get
there; he had no notion at all of his reason for travelling in that
direction. It dawned upon him by degrees that he had chosen the very
same route, and made the same stoppages, as he had done when he was a
mere boy, travelling with his father upon the Continent. Richard and his
mother had not been there; Brian and Mr. Luttrell had spent a
particularly happy time together, and the remembrance of it soothed his
troubled brain, and caused his eye to rest with a sort of dreamy
pleasure upon the scene around him.

It was rather late for a Rhine expedition, and the boat was not at all
full. Brian rather thought that the journey with his father had been
taken at about the same time of the year--perhaps even a little later.
He had a special memory of the wealth of Virginian creeper which covered
the buildings near Coblentz. He looked out for it when the boat stopped
at the landing-stage, and thought of the time when he had wandered
hand-in-hand with his father in the pleasant Anlagen on the river banks,
and gathered a scarlet trail of leaves from the castle walls. The leaves
were in their full autumnal glory now; he must have been there at about
the same season when he was a boy.

After determining this fact to his satisfaction, Brian went back to the
seat that he had found for himself at the end of the boat, and began
once more to watch the gliding panorama of "castled crag" and vine-clad
slope, which was hardly as familiar to him as it is to most of us. But,
after all, Drachenfels and Ehrenbreitstein had no great interest for
him. He had no great interest in anything. Perhaps the little excitement
and bustle at the landing-places pleased him more than the scenery
itself--the peasants shouting to each other from the banks, the baskets
of grapes handed in one after another, the patient oxen waiting in the
roads between the shafts; these were sights which made no great claim
upon his attention and were curiously soothing to his jaded nerves. He
watched them languidly, but was not sorry from time to time to close his
eyes and shut out his surroundings altogether.

T