miracle!_ and would
offer a prize to the philosopher who should give a satisfactory
explanation of so marvellous a phenomenon. He is the best fellow under
the sun; but all my painstaking to break him of this perverseness has
been utterly vain and thrown away; and if I would not earn scurvy
thanks for my goodwill, I must even let him follow his own devices."

"Might not a physician do him good?" remarkt Anderson.

"It is one of his whims," replied Roderick, "to entertain a supreme
contempt for the whole medical art. He will have it that every disease
is something different and distinct in every particular patient, that
there is no arranging it under any class, and that it is absurd to
think of healing it by attending to ancient practice, and still more
so by what is called theory: he would much rather apply to an old
woman, and make use of sympathetic cures. In like manner he despises
all foresight in other matters, and everything like regularity,
moderation, and common sense: the last above all he holds in special
abhorrence, as the antipode and arch-enemy to all enthusiasm. While
yet a child he framed for himself an ideal of a noble character; and
his constant aim is to make himself what he considers such, that is to
say, a being who shews his superiority to all earthly things by his
scorn for riches. Merely to avoid being suspected of stinginess, or of
giving unwillingly, or of caring about money, he flings it right and
left by handfuls; with all his large fortune he is for ever poor and
distrest, and is the bubble of all such as are not gifted with
precisely the same sort of magnanimity which for himself he is
determined to attain to. To be his friend is the task of all tasks:
for he is so touchy, you need only cough, or eat with your knife, or
not sip your drink as delicately as a cow, or even pick your teeth, to
offend him mortally."

"Was he never in love?" askt his country friend.

"Whom should he love? whom could he love?" answered Roderick. "He
despises all the daughters of earth; and if he had a favorite, and
were ever to suspect that she had not an angelical contempt for dress,
or liked dancing at times as well as star-gazing, it would break his
heart: still more tremendous would it be, if she were ever so unlucky
as to sneeze."

Meanwhile Emilius was again standing among the crowd: but on a sudden
he was seized by that heart-burning, that shivering, which had already
so often come over him in the midst