e are as comets to
the earth, seemingly strange and erratic portents; distinct from the
ordinary lights which guide our course and mark our seasons, yet
true to their own laws, potent in their own influences. Philosophy
speculates on their effects, and disputes upon their uses; men who
do not philosophize regard them as special messengers and bodes of
evil.

They came out of the little park into a by-lane; a vast tract of common
land, yellow with furze and undulated with swell and hollow, spreading
in front; to their right the dark beechwoods, still beneath the weight
of the July noon. Lionel had been talking about the "Faerie Queene,"
knight-errantry, the sweet impossible dream-life that, safe from Time,
glides by bower and hall, through magic forests and by witching eaves
in the world of poet-books. And Darrell listened, and the flute-notes
mingled with the atmosphere faint and far off, like voices from that
world itself.

Out then they came, this broad waste land before them; and Lionel said
merrily,--

"But this is the very scene! Here the young knight, leaving his father's
hall, would have checked his destrier, glancing wistfully now over that
green wild which seems so boundless, now to the 'umbrageous horror' of
those breathless woodlands, and questioned himself which way to take for
adventure."

"Yes," said Darrell, coming out from his long reserve on all that
concerned his past life,--"Yes, and the gold of the gorse-blossoms
tempted me; and I took the waste land." He paused a moment, and renewed:
"And then, when I had known cities and men, and snatched romance from
dull matter-of-fact, then I would have done as civilization does
with romance itself,--I would have enclosed the waste land for my own
aggrandizement. Look," he continued, with a sweep of the hand round the
width of prospect, "all that you see to the verge of the horizon, some
fourteen years ago, was to have been thrown into the pretty paddock
we have just quitted, and serve as park round the house I was then
building. Vanity of human wishes! What but the several proportions of
their common folly distinguishes the baffled squire from the arrested
conqueror? Man's characteristic cerebral organ must certainly be
acquisitiveness."

"Was it his organ of acquisitiveness that moved Themistocles to
boast that 'he could make a small state great'?" "Well
remembered,--ingeniously quoted," returned Darrell, with the polite bend
of his s