owly in its death-stream through
the grasses, staining red the arid turf.

And the sun had gone down upon his wrath.

* * *

Mes freres! it is well for us that we are no seers! Were we cursed with
prevision, could we know how, when the idle trifle of the present hour
shall have been forged into a link of the past, it will stretch out and
bind captive the whole future in its bonds, we should be paralysed,
hopeless, powerless, old ere we were young! It is well for us that we
are no seers. Were we cursed with second sight, we should see the white
shroud breast-high above the living man, the phosphor light of death
gleaming on the youthful radiant face, the feathery seed, lightly sown,
bearing in it the germ of the upas-tree; the idle careless word, daily
uttered, carrying in its womb the future bane of a lifetime; we should
see these things till we sickened, and reeled, and grew blind with pain
before the ghastly face of the Future, as men in ancient days before the
loathsome visage of the Medusa!

* * *

Contretemps generally have some saving crumbs of consolation for those
who laugh at fate, and look good-humouredly for them; life's only evil
to him who wears it awkwardly, and philosophic resignation works as many
miracles as Harlequin; grumble, and you go to the dogs in a wretched
style; make _mots_ on your own misery, and you've no idea how pleasant a
_trajet_ even drifting "to the bad" may become.

* * *

The statue that Strathmore at once moulded and marred was his life: the
statue which we all, as we sketch it, endow with the strength of the
Milo, the glory of the Belvedere, the winged brilliance of the Perseus!
which ever lies at its best; when the chisel has dropped from our hands,
as they grow powerless and paralysed with death; like the mutilated
torso; a fragment unfinished and broken, food for the ants and worms,
buried in the sands that will quickly suck it down from sight or memory,
with but touches of glory and of value left here and there, only faintly
serving to show what _might have been_, had we had time, had we had
wisdom!

* * *

With which satirical reflection on his times and his order drifting
through his mind, Strathmore's thoughts floated onward to a piece of
statecraft then numbered among the delicate diplomacies and intricate
embroglie of Europe, whose moves absorbed him as the finesses of a
problem absorb a