is, but of what has been, and yet may be again.  For my part, I care not to take the livery without the service.  Pshaw! will things never mend!  Are the good old times, and the good old international hatreds, gone by for ever?  Shall we never again have a thorough, seasonable, wholesome, continental war?  This place (Vienna) would be worth fighting for, if one had the chance.  I sometimes amuse myself by planning a siege, when I ride round the fortifications, as is my custom of an afternoon.”

In another, after telling me that he had been reading some books of travel in Egypt and Central America, he said:—­

“Next to a military life I think that of a traveller—­a genuine traveller, who turns his back upon railroads and guides—­must be the most exciting and the most enviable under heaven.  Since reading these books, I dream of the jungle and the desert, and fancy that a buffalo-hunt must be almost as fine sport as a charge of cavalry.  Oh, what a weary exile this is!  I feel as if the very air were stagnant around me, and I, like the accursed vessel that carried the ancient mariner,—­

     As idle as a painted ship,
     Upon a painted ocean.’”

Sometimes, though rarely, he mentioned Madame de Courcelles, and then very guardedly:  always as “Madame de Courcelles,” and never as his wife.

“That morning,” he wrote, “comes back to me with all the vagueness of a dream—­you will know what morning I mean, and why it fills so shadowy a page in the book of my memory.  And it might as well have been a dream, for aught of present peace or future hope that it has brought me.  I often think that I was selfish when I exacted that pledge from her.  I do not see of what good it can be to either her or me, or in what sense I can be said to have gained even the power to protect and serve her.  Would that I were rich; or that she and I were poor together, and dwelling far away in some American wild, under the shade of primeval trees, the world forgetting; by the world forgot!  I should enjoy the life of a Canadian settler—­so free, so rational, so manly.  How happy we might be—­she with her children, her garden, her books; I with my dogs, my gun, my lands!  What a curse it is, this spider’s web of civilization, that hems and cramps us in on every side, and from which not all the armor of common-sense is sufficient to preserve us!”

Sometimes he broke into a strain of forced gayety, more sad, to my thinking, than the bitterest lamentations could have been.

“I wish to Heaven,” he said, in one of his later letters—­“I wish to Heaven I had no heart, and no brain!  I wish I was, like some worthy people I know, a mere human zoophyte, consisting of nothing but a mouth and a stomach.  Only conceive how it must simplify life when once one has succeeded in making a clean sweep of all those finer emotions which harass more complicated organisms!  Enviable zoophytes, that live only to digest!—­who would not be of the brotherhood?”