, still nameless, to the Hall. Vain kindness, vain efforts. He could
only sit in a still growing horror, writing nothing, ignorant of all,
his mind filled with a single memory of the breaking day and his own
intolerable fear. And that same night he was tossing in a brain fever.

People are afraid of war and wounds and dentists, all with excellent
reason; but these are not to be compared with such chaotic terrors of
the mind as fell on this young man. We all have by our bedsides the box
of the Merchant Abudah, thank God, securely enough shut; but when a
young man sacrifices sleep to labour, let him have a care, for he is
playing with the lock.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] For the "Book" of the Edinburgh University Union Fancy Fair, 1886.

[4] Professor Tait's laboratory assistant.

[5] Charles Edward Appleton, D.C.L., Fellow of St. John's College,
Oxford, founder and first editor of the _Academy_: born 1841, died
1879.

III

OLD MORTALITY

I

There is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a prison,
on the other by the windows of a quiet hotel; below, under a steep
cliff, it beholds the traffic of many lines of rail, and the scream of
the engine and the shock of meeting buffers mount to it all day long.
The aisles are lined with the enclosed sepulchres of families, door
beyond door, like houses in a street; and in the morning the shadows of
the prison turrets, and of many tall memorials, fall upon the graves.
There, in the hot fits of youth, I came to be unhappy. Pleasant
incidents are woven with my memory of the place. I here made friends
with a certain plain old gentleman, a visitor on sunny mornings, gravely
cheerful, who, with one eye upon the place that awaited him, chirped
about his youth like winter sparrows; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel
once, for some days together, dumbly flirted with me from a window and
kept my wild heart flying; and once--she possibly remembers--the wise
Eugenia followed me to that austere enclosure. Her hair came down, and
in the shelter of a tomb my trembling fingers helped her to repair the
braid. But for the most part I went there solitary, and, with
irrevocable emotion, pored on the names of the forgotten. Name after
name, and to each the conventional attributions and the idle dates: a
regiment of the unknown that had been the joy of mothers, and had
thrilled with the illusions of youth, and at last, in the dim sick-room,
wrestled with the