of prospect, "all that you see to the verge of the horizon, some fourteen years ago, was to have been thrown into the pretty paddock we have just quitted, and serve as park round the house I was then building. Vanity of human wishes! What but the several proportions of their common folly distinguishes the baffled squire from the arrested conqueror? Man's characteristic cerebral organ must certainly be acquisitiveness."
"Was it his organ of acquisitiveness that moved Themistocles to boast that 'he could make a small state great'?" "Well remembered,—ingeniously quoted," returned Darrell, with the polite bend of his stately head. "Yes, I suspect that the coveting organ had much to do with the boast. To build a name was the earliest dream of Themistocles, if we are to accept the anecdote that makes him say, 'The trophies of Miltiades would not suffer him to sleep,' To build a name, or to create a fortune, are but varying applications of one human passion. The desire of something we have not is the first of our childish remembrances: it matters not what form it takes, what object it longs for; still it is to acquire! it never deserts us while we live."
"And yet, if I might, I should like to ask, what you now desire that you do not possess?"
"I—nothing; but I spoke of the living! I am dead. Only," added Darrell, with his silvery laugh, "I say, as poor Chesterfield said before me, 'It is a secret: keep it.'"
Lionel made no reply; the melancholy of the words saddened him: but Darrell's manner repelled the expression of sympathy or of interest; and the boy fell into conjecture, what had killed to the world this man's intellectual life?
And thus silently they continued to wander on till the sound of the flute had long been lost to their ears. Was the musician playing still?
At length they came round to the other end of Fawley village, and Darrell again became animated.
"Perhaps," said he, returning to the subject of talk that had been abruptly suspended,—"perhaps the love of power is at the origin of each restless courtship of Fortune: yet, after all, who has power with less alloy than the village thane? With so little effort, so little thought, the man in the manor-house can make men in the cottage happier here below and more fit for a hereafter yonder. In leaving the world I come from contest and pilgrimage, like our sires the Crusaders, to reign at home."
As he spoke, he entered one of the cottages. An old paralytic man was seated by the fire, hot though the July sun was out of
