you would spoil me and ruin me: for no quality a man
can have is so dangerous as vanity, which draws food from everything."

"What do you mean by vanity?" asked Edward.

"All our feelings," answered the old man, "the best and honestest, the
gentlest and blissfullest, are rooted in this poisonous soil. But more
of this another time. I only wanted to tell you briefly, how I
acquired my fortune, how my character took that cast under which you
have learnt to know me. After my parents death I fulfilled my father's
last wish by uniting myself to a girl who was also a distant relation
of our family. She was poor, unprovided, unprotected, had grown up
amid straits without any kind of education; at the same time she was
hideously ugly, and her temper was so morose and quarrelsome, that I
never spent a pleasant hour with her, and had very few peaceful ones
so long as she lived. My situation was horrible."

"But how came you to marry her?" said Edward.

"Because I had given my word to my father," continued Balthasar; "and
because it is a principle of mine, that man must never gratify his
passions, least of all that of love. My conviction is, that our life
is a state of torment and woe; and the more we try to escape from
these feelings, the more awful vengeance do our terrours afterward
take upon us. As to why this is so, who can fathom that question?"

"This belief," answered Edward, "is extremely strange, and at variance
with all our wishes, nay with everyday experience."

"O how scanty then must your experience have been hitherto!" replied
the old man. "Everything lives and moves, only to die and to rot:
everything feels, only to feel pangs. Our inward agony spurs us on to
what we call joy; and all wherewith spring and hope and love and
pleasure beguile mankind, is only the inverted sting of pain. Life is
woe, hope sadness, thought and reflexion despair."

"And supposing all to be so," said Edward somewhat timidly, "do we not
find comfort and help in religion?"

The old man lifted up his eyes and gazed fixedly in his young
companion's face: his dark look grew brighter, not however with
pleasure or any soft emotion; but so strange a smile ran across his
pale furrowed features, that it lookt very much like scorn; and Edward
involuntarily thought of the miner's words.

"Let us turn aside from this theme for today," said the old man with
his usual gloomy air; "we shall probably find time hereafter to speak
of it. Thus I li