ance, and the sky so blue,
and the sun so bright, and an old ruined castle on the mountain-side,
far away. I used to watch the line where earth and sky met, and longed
to go and seek there the key of all mysteries, thinking that I might
find there a new life, perhaps some great city where life should be
grander and richer--and then it struck me that life may be grand enough
even in a prison."

"I read that last most praiseworthy thought in my manual, when I was
twelve years old," said Aglaya.

"All this is pure philosophy," said Adelaida. "You are a philosopher,
prince, and have come here to instruct us in your views."

"Perhaps you are right," said the prince, smiling. "I think I am a
philosopher, perhaps, and who knows, perhaps I do wish to teach my views
of things to those I meet with?"

"Your philosophy is rather like that of an old woman we know, who is
rich and yet does nothing but try how little she can spend. She talks of
nothing but money all day. Your great philosophical idea of a grand life
in a prison and your four happy years in that Swiss village are like
this, rather," said Aglaya.

"As to life in a prison, of course there may be two opinions," said the
prince. "I once heard the story of a man who lived twelve years in a
prison--I heard it from the man himself. He was one of the persons under
treatment with my professor; he had fits, and attacks of melancholy,
then he would weep, and once he tried to commit suicide. HIS life in
prison was sad enough; his only acquaintances were spiders and a tree
that grew outside his grating-but I think I had better tell you of
another man I met last year. There was a very strange feature in this
case, strange because of its extremely rare occurrence. This man had
once been brought to the scaffold in company with several others, and
had had the sentence of death by shooting passed upon him for some
political crime. Twenty minutes later he had been reprieved and
some other punishment substituted; but the interval between the two
sentences, twenty minutes, or at least a quarter of an hour, had been
passed in the certainty that within a few minutes he must die. I was
very anxious to hear him speak of his impressions during that dreadful
time, and I several times inquired of him as to what he thought and
felt. He remembered everything with the most accurate and extraordinary
distinctness, and declared that he would never forget a single iota of
the experience.

"Abou