lame upon his more mercurial
companion, Darsie Latimer.

This youth, as the reader must be aware, had been received as an inmate
into the family of Mr. Fairford, senior, at a time when some of the
delicacy of constitution which had abridged the life of his consort
began to show itself in the son, and when the father was, of course,
peculiarly disposed to indulge his slightest wish. That the young
Englishman was able to pay a considerable board, was a matter of no
importance to Mr. Fairford; it was enough that his presence seemed to
make his son cheerful and happy. He was compelled to allow that 'Darsie
was a fine lad, though unsettled,' and he would have had some difficulty
in getting rid of him, and the apprehensions which his levities excited,
had it not been for the voluntary excursion which gave rise to the
preceding correspondence, and in which Mr. Fairford secretly rejoiced,
as affording the means of separating Alan from his gay companion, at
least until he should have assumed, and become accustomed to, the duties
of his dry and laborious profession.

But the absence of Darsie was far from promoting the end which the elder
Mr. Fairford had expected and desired. The young men were united by the
closest bonds of intimacy; and the more so, that neither of them sought
nor desired to admit any others into their society. Alan Fairford was
averse to general company, from a disposition naturally reserved,
and Darsie Latimer from a painful sense of his own unknown origin,
peculiarly afflicting in a country where high and low are professed
genealogists. The young men were all in all to each other; it is no
wonder, therefore, that their separation was painful, and that its
effects upon Alan Fairford, joined to the anxiety occasioned by the
tenor of his friend's letters, greatly exceeded what the senior had
anticipated. The young man went through his usual duties, his studies,
and the examinations to which he was subjected, but with nothing like
the zeal and assiduity which he had formerly displayed; and his anxious
and observant father saw but too plainly that his heart was with his
absent comrade.

A philosopher would have given way to this tide of feeling, in hopes to
have diminished its excess, and permitted the youths to have been
some time together, that their intimacy might have been broken off by
degrees; but Mr. Fairford only saw the more direct mode of continued
restraint, which, however, he was desirous of veili