een about it?"

"From the first to the last, twenty-five years, and it is still
incomplete."

"Um!" said the prince, smiling, "Master Warner, thou hast read of the
judgment of Solomon,--how the wise king discovered the truth by ordering
the child's death?"

"It was indeed," said Adam, unsuspectingly, "a most shrewd suggestion of
native wit and clerkly wisdom."

"Glad am I thou approvest it, Master Warner," said Richard. And as he
spoke the tormentor reappeared with a smith, armed with the implements
of his trade.

"Good smith, break into pieces this stubborn iron; bare all its
receptacles; leave not one fragment standing on the other! 'Delenda est
tua Carthago,' Master Warner. There is Latin in answer to thy logic."

It is impossible to convey any notion of the terror, the rage, the
despair, which seized upon the unhappy sage when these words smote his
ear, and he saw the smith's brawny arms swing on high the ponderous
hammer. He flung himself between the murderous stroke and his beloved
model. He embraced the grim iron tightly. "Kill me!" he exclaimed
sublimely, "kill me!--not my THOUGHT!"

"Solomon was verily and indeed a wise king," said the duke, with a low
inward laugh. "And now, man, I have thee! To save thy infant, thine
art's hideous infant, confess the whole!"

It was then that a fierce struggle evidently took place in Adam's bosom.
It was, perhaps--O reader! thou whom pleasure, love, ambition, hatred,
avarice, in thine and our ordinary existence, tempt--it was, perhaps, to
him the one arch-temptation of a life. In the changing countenance, the
heaving breast, the trembling lip, the eyes that closed and opened to
close again, as if to shut out the unworthy weakness,--yea, in the whole
physical man,--was seen the crisis of the moral struggle. And what, in
truth, to him an Edward or a Henry, a Lancaster or a York? Nothing. But
still that instinct, that principle, that conscience, ever strongest in
those whose eyes are accustomed to the search of truth, prevailed. So
he rose suddenly and quietly, drew himself apart, left his work to the
Destroyer, and said,--

"Prince, thou art a boy! Let a boy's voice annihilate that which should
have served all time. Strike!"

Richard motioned; the hammer descended, the engine and its appurtenances
reeled and crashed, the doors flew open, the wheels rattled, the sparks
flew. And Adam Warner fell to the ground, as if the blow had broken his
own heart. Little heeding