y were beings like the old Lares,--not dead
in graves, but images ever present on household hearths. Doubtless he
exaggerated their worth, as their old importance. Obscure, indeed, in
the annals of empire, their deeds and their power, their decline and
fall. Not so thought he; they were to his eyes the moon-track in the
ocean of history,--light on the waves over which they had gleamed,--all
the ocean elsewhere dark! With him thought I; as my father spoke, his
child believed. But what to the eyes of the world was this inheritor of
a vaunted name?--a threadbare, slighted, rustic pedant; no station in
the very province in which mouldered away the last lowly dwelling-place
of his line,--by lineage high above most nobles, in position below most
yeomen. He had learning; he had genius: but the studies to which they
were devoted only served yet more to impoverish his scanty means, and
led rather to ridicule than to honour. Not a day but what I saw on his
soft features the smart of a fresh sting, the gnawing of a new care.
Thus, as a boy, feeling in myself a strength inspired by affection,
I came to him one day as he sat grieving, and kneeling to him, said,
'Father, courage yet a little while; I shall soon be a man, and I swear
to devote myself as man to revive the old fading race so prized by you;
to rebuild the House that, by you so loved, is loftier in my eyes than
all the heraldry of kings.' And my father's face brightened, and his
voice blessed me; and I rose up--ambitious!" Darrell paused, heaved a
short, quick sigh, and then rapidly continued,

"I was fortunate at the University. That was a day when chiefs of party
looked for recruits amongst young men who had given the proofs and won
the first-fruits of emulation and assiduity; for statesmanship then was
deemed an art which, like that of war, needs early discipline. I had
scarcely left college when I was offered a seat in Parliament by the
head of the Viponts, an old Lord Montfort. I was dazzled but for one
moment; I declined the next. The fallen House of Darrell needed wealth;
and Parliamentary success, in its higher honours, often requires
wealth,--never gives it. It chanced that I had a college acquaintance
with a young man named Vipont Crooke. His grandfather, one of the
numberless Viponts, had been compelled to add the name of Crooke to his
own, on succeeding to the property of some rich uncle, who was one of
the numberless Crookes. I went with this college acquainta