added half sarcastically) "that you have
not got more than enough for yourself. I assure you that I am far
from happy."

He spoke with so much gravity, that I hardly knew whether to
attribute it to some intention of dissembling a little with his
friend, or to an involuntary expression of the experience of a mind
that felt the sorrows of a genuine scepticism. It might be both.

However, it brought things to a crisis at once. His college friend
looked equally surprised and pleased at his appeal.

"I trust," said he, with becoming solemnity, "that all this is
merely a temporary reaction from having believed too much; the
languor and dejection which attend the morrow after a night's
debauch. I assure you that I rejoice rather than grieve to hear
that you have curtailed your orthodoxy. It has been just my
own case, as you know: only I flatter myself, that, perhaps having
less subtilty than you, I have not passed the 'golden mean' between
superstition and scepticism,--between believing too much and
believing too little."

I looked up for a moment. I saw a laugh in Harrington's eyes, but
not a feature moved. It passed away immediately.

"I tell you," said he, "that I believe absolutely no one religious
dogma whatever; while yet I would give worlds, if I had them, to set
my foot upon a rock. I should even be grateful to any one, who, if he
did not give me truth, gave me a phantom of it, which I could mistake
for reality." He again spoke with an earnestness of tone and manner,
which convinced me that, if there were any dissimulation, it cost him
little trouble.

"If you merely meant," said Fellowes, "that you do not retain any
vestige of your early 'historical' and 'dogmatical' Christianity, why,
I retain just as little of it. Indeed, I doubt," he continued, with
perhaps superfluous candor, "whether I ever was a Christian"; and he
seemed rather anxious to show that his creed had been nominal.

"If it will save you the trouble of proving it." said Harrington,
"I will liberally grant you both your premises and your conclusion,
without asking you to state the one or prove the other."

"Well, then, Christian or no Christian. there was a time, at all
events, when I was orthodox, you will grant that; when I should hate
been willing to sign the Thirty-nine Articles: or three hundred and
thirty-nine; or the Confession of Faith: or any other compilation, or
all others; though perhaps, if strictly examined, I might have been
f