eleven. No life could be more methodical; yet
to Lionel it had an animating charm, for his interest in his host daily
increased, and varied his thoughts with perpetual occupation. Darrell,
on the contrary, while more kind and cordial, more cautiously on his
guard not to wound his young guest's susceptibilities than he had been
before the quarrel and its reconciliation, did not seem to feel for
Lionel the active interest which Lionel felt for him. He did not, as
most clever men are apt to do in their intercourse with youth, attempt
to draw him out, plumb his intellect, or guide his tastes. If he was
at times instructive, it was because talk fell on subjects on which
it pleased himself to touch, and in which he could not speak without
involuntarily instructing. Nor did he ever allure the boy to talk of
his school-days, of his friends, of his predilections, his hopes, his
future. In short, had you observed them together, you would have never
supposed they were connections, that one could and ought to influence
and direct the career of the other. You would have said the host
certainly liked the guest, as any man would like a promising,
warm-hearted, high-spirited, graceful boy, under his own roof for a
short time, but who felt that that boy was nothing to him; would soon
pass from his eye; form friends, pursuits, aims, with which he could be
in no way commingled, for which he should be wholly irresponsible. There
was also this peculiarity in Darrell's conversation; if he never spoke
of his guest's past and future, neither did he ever do more than advert
in the most general terms to his own. Of that grand stage on which he
had been so brilliant an actor he imparted no reminiscences; of those
great men, the leaders of his age, with whom he had mingled familiarly,
he told no anecdotes. Equally silent was he as to the earlier steps in
his career, the modes by which he had studied, the accidents of which he
had seized advantage,--silent there as upon the causes he had gained, or
the debates he had adorned. Never could you have supposed that this man,
still in the prime of public life, had been the theme of journals and
the boast of party. Neither did he ever, as men who talk easily at
their own hearths are prone to do, speak of projects in the future,
even though the projects be no vaster than the planting of a tree or the
alteration of a parterre,--projects with which rural life so copiously
and so innocently teems. The past seem