gment which
hazards the sortie or decides on the retreat!"

"Gently, gently!" cried Vance. "We shall be into that omnibus! Give me
the whip,--do; there, a little more to the left,--so. Yes; I am glad to
see such enthusiasm in your profession: 't is half the battle. Hazlitt
said a capital thing, 'The 'prentice who does not consider the Lord
Mayor in his gilt coach the greatest man in the world will live to be
hanged!'"

"Pish!" said Lionel, catching at the whip.

VANCE (holding it back).--"No. I apologize. I retract the Lord Mayor:
comparisons are odious. I agree with you, nothing like leather. I mean
nothing like a really great soldier,--Hannibal, and so forth. Cherish
that conviction, my friend: meanwhile, respect human life; there is
another omnibus!"

The danger past, the artist thought it prudent to divert the
conversation into some channel less exciting.

"Mr. Darrell, of course, consents to your choice of a profession?"

"Consents! approves, encourages. Wrote me such a beautiful letter! what
a comprehensive intelligence that man has!"

"Necessarily; since he agrees with you. Where is he now?"

"I have no notion: it is some months since I heard from him. He was then
at Malta, on his return from Asia Minor."

"So! you have never seen him since he bade you farewell at his old
Manor-house?"

"Never. He has not, I believe, been in England."

"Nor in Paris, where you seem to have chiefly resided."

"Nor in Paris. Ah, Vance, could I but be of some comfort to him. Now
that I am older, I think I understand in him much that perplexed me as
a boy when we parted. Darrell is one of those men who require a
home. Between the great world and solitude, he needs the intermediate
filling-up which the life domestic alone supplies: a wife to realize the
sweet word helpmate; children, with whose future he could knit his
own toils and his ancestral remembrances. That intermediate space
annihilated, the great world and the solitude are left, each frowning on
the other."

"My dear Lionel, you must have lived with very clever people: you are
talking far above your years."

"Am I? True; I have lived, if not with very clever people, with people
far above my years. That is a secret I learned from Colonel Morley,
to whom I must present you,--the subtlest intellect under the quietest
manner. Once he said to me, 'Would you throughout life be up to the
height of your century,--always in the prime of man's reason, without
cruden