k off a glass of wine. "Find me a bed, Uncle Gervase," said
he. "I feel that I can sleep the clock round."

We rode out of London next day. He started in a fret to be home, but
this impatience declined by the way, and by the time we crossed Tamar
had sunk to a lethargy. Sore was I to mark the dull gaze he lifted
(by habit) at the corner of the road where Constantine comes into
view; and sorer the morning after, when, having put gun into his hand
and packed him off with Diana, the old setter, at his heel, I met him
an hour later returning dejectedly to the house. For the next three
or four months he went listless as a man dragging a wounded limb.
But since spring brought back rod and angle, I think and pray that
the voice of running water (best medicine in Nature) begins to cure
him. He has written the foregoing narrative in a hot fit which,
while it lasted, more than once kept his lamp burning till daybreak;
and although the last chapter was no sooner finished than he flung
the whole away in disgust. I have hopes of him. I may even live to
see a child running about these silent terraces . . . But this, my
dearest wish, outruns all present indications; and if Prosper ever
marries again it will be as his father married, and not for love.[1]

By good fortune I am able to supply the reader with some later news
of two members of the expedition, Mr. Fett and Mr. Badcock. It came
to me, early this summer, in the following letter:--

_To Gervase Arundel, Esq., of Constantine in Cornwall, England_.

"Venice.
Ash Wednesday (4.30 a.m.), 1761.

"Excellent Sir,

"I take up my pen, and lay aside the false nose I have been
wearing night and day for close on a week, to make a
communication which will doubtless interest you as it has
profoundly affected me. It will also interest your nephew and
his lady (whose hands I kiss) if they succeeded in effecting
their escape to England--where, failing news of them, I do
myself a frequent pleasure to picture them at rest upon the
quiet waters of domestic felicity. But I address myself rather
to you, whom (albeit on the briefest acquaintance) I shall ever
regard as the personification of stability and mild repose.
Heracleitus and his followers may prate of a world of flux; but
there are men to whom the recollections of the