story must be true and a conception of its hero’s character.  Whenever any subject so forcibly affects the mind, time is well spent in thinking of it.  If the reader choose, let him do his own meditation; or if he prefer to ramble with me through the twenty years of Wakefield’s vagary, I bid him welcome, trusting that there will be a pervading spirit and a moral, even should we fail to find them, done up neatly and condensed into the final sentence.  Thought has always its efficacy and every striking incident its moral.

What sort of a man was Wakefield?  We are free to shape out our own idea and call it by his name.  He was now in the meridian of life; his matrimonial affections, never violent, were sobered into a calm, habitual sentiment; of all husbands, he was likely to be the most constant, because a certain sluggishness would keep his heart at rest wherever it might be placed.  He was intellectual, but not actively so; his mind occupied itself in long and lazy musings that tended to no purpose or had not vigor to attain it; his thoughts were seldom so energetic as to seize hold of words.  Imagination, in the proper meaning of the term, made no part of Wakefield’s gifts.  With a cold but not depraved nor wandering heart, and a mind never feverish with riotous thoughts nor perplexed with originality, who could have anticipated that our friend would entitle himself to a foremost place among the doers of eccentric deeds?  Had his acquaintances been asked who was the man in London the surest to perform nothing to-day which should be remembered on the morrow, they would have thought of Wakefield.  Only the wife of his bosom might have hesitated.  She, without having analyzed his character, was partly aware of a quiet selfishness that had rusted into his inactive mind; of a peculiar sort of vanity, the most uneasy attribute about him; of a disposition to craft which had seldom produced more positive effects than the keeping of petty secrets hardly worth revealing; and, lastly, of what she called a little strangeness sometimes in the good man.  This latter quality is indefinable, and perhaps non-existent.

Let us now imagine Wakefield bidding adieu to his wife.  It is the dusk of an October evening.  His equipment is a drab greatcoat, a hat covered with an oil-cloth, top-boots, an umbrella in one hand and a small portmanteau in the other.  He has informed Mrs. Wakefield that he is to take the night-coach into the country.  She would fain inquire the length of his journey, its object and the probable time of his return, but, indulgent to his harmless love of mystery, interrogates him only by a look.  He tells her not to expect him positively by the return-coach nor to be alarmed should he tarry three or four days, but, at all events, to look for him at supper on Friday evening.  Wakefield, himself, be it considered, has no suspicion of what is before him.  He holds out his hand; she gives her own and meets his parting kiss in the matter-of-course way of a ten years’