a life laborious and monotonous in the extreme, had confirmed in him a melancholy to which he was constitutionally inclined, and which appeared to be rather heightened than diminished by exceptional success in a difficult career.  I hesitate to describe his attitude as pessimistic, for the word has associations with the schools from which he was singularly free.  His melancholy was not the artificial product of a philosophic system; it was temperamental rather than intellectual, and might be described, perhaps, as an intuition rather than a judgment of the worthlessness and irrationality of the world.  Such a position is not readily shaken by argument, nor did I make any direct attempt to assail it; but it could not fail to impress itself strongly upon my mind, and to keep my thoughts constantly employed upon that old problem of the worth of things, in which, indeed, for other reasons, I was already sufficiently interested.

A further impulse in the same direction was given by the arrival of another old friend, Arthur Ellis.  He and I had been drawn together at college by a common interest in philosophy; but in later years our paths had diverged widely.  Fortune and inclination had led him into an active career, and for some years he had been travelling abroad as correspondent to one of the daily papers.  I felt, therefore, some curiosity to renew my acquaintance with him, and to ascertain how far his views had been modified by his experience of the world.

The morning after his arrival he joined Audubon and myself in a kind of loggia at the back of the house, which was our common place of rendezvous.  We exchanged the usual greetings, and for some minutes nothing more was said, so pleasant was it to sit silent in the shade listening to the swish of scythes (they were cutting the grass in the meadow opposite) and to the bubbling of a little fountain in the garden on our right, while the sun grew hotter every minute on the fir-covered slopes beyond.  I wanted to talk, and yet I was unwilling to begin; but presently Ellis turned to me and said:  “Well, my dear philosopher, and how goes the world with you?  What have you been doing in all these years since we met?”

“Oh,” I replied, “nothing worth talking about.”

“What have you been thinking then?”

“Just now I have been thinking how well you look.  Knocking about the world seems to suit you.”

“I think it does.  And yet at this moment, whether it be the quiet of the place, or whether it be the sight of your philosophic countenance, I feel a kind of yearning for the contemplative life.  I believe if I stayed here long you would lure me back to philosophy; and yet I thought I had finally escaped when I broke away from you before.”

“It is not so easy,” I said, “to escape from that net, once one is caught.  But it was not I who spread the snare; I was only trying to help you out, or, at least, to get out myself.”

“And have you found a way?”