for a quarter of an hour he sent for me. He had severe attacks of neuralgia, and he used to sit at his window, basking in the sun. He kept an opera-glass at hand, and when I was out in the garden he used to watch me with it. A few days before his death, I was twenty-seven years old, and the most innocent youth, I suppose, on the continent. After he died I missed him greatly," Pickering continued, evidently with no intention of making an epigram. "I stayed at home, in a sort of dull stupor. It seemed as if life offered itself to me for the first time, and yet as if I did n't know how to take hold of it."
He uttered all this with a frank eagerness which increased as he talked, and there was a singular contrast between the meagre experience he described and a certaint radiant intelligence which I seemed to perceive in his glance and tone. Evidently, he was a clever fellow, and his natural faculties were excellent. I imagined he had read a great deal, and recovered, in some degree, in restless intellectual conjecture, the freedom he was condemned to ignore in practice. Opportunity was now offering a meaning to the empty forms with which his imagination was stored, but it appeared to him dimly, through the veil of his personal diffidence.
"I've not sailed round the world, as you suppose," I said, "but I confess I envy you the novelties you
