great pains over the work, and that it was well done, and being still a young man he expected praise.  He found that in this hard world there was a lack of appreciation; a critical spirit seemed abroad.  If he could have been scientifically observed as he writhed and smarted under the strictures of “the old fool,” as he rudely called his cousin, the spectacle would have been extremely diverting.  Little boys sometimes enjoy a very similar entertainment; either with their tiny fingers or with mamma’s nail scissors they gradually deprive a fly of its wings and legs.  The odd gyrations and queer thin buzzings of the creature as it spins comically round and round never fail to provide a fund of harmless amusement.  Lucian, indeed, fancied himself a very ill-used individual; but he should have tried to imitate the nervous organization of the flies, which, as mamma says, “can’t really feel.”

But now, as he prepared the vellum leaves, he remembered his art with joy; he had not labored to do beautiful work in vain.  He read over his manuscript once more, and thought of the designing of the pages.  He made sketches on furtive sheets of paper, and hunted up books in his father’s library for suggestions.  There were books about architecture, and medieval iron work, and brasses which contributed hints for adornment; and not content with mere pictures he sought in the woods and hedges, scanning the strange forms of trees, and the poisonous growth of great water-plants, and the parasite twining of honeysuckle and briony.  In one of these rambles he discovered a red earth which he made into a pigment, and he found in the unctuous juice of a certain fern an ingredient which he thought made his black ink still more glossy.  His book was written all in symbols, and in the same spirit of symbolism he decorated it, causing wonderful foliage to creep about the text, and showing the blossom of certain mystical flowers, with emblems of strange creatures, caught and bound in rose thickets.  All was dedicated to love and a lover’s madness, and there were songs in it which haunted him with their lilt and refrain.  When the book was finished it replaced the loose leaves as his constant companion by day and night.  Three times a day he repeated his ritual to himself, seeking out the loneliest places in the woods, or going up to his room; and from the fixed intentness and rapture of his gaze, the father thought him still severely employed in the questionable process of composition.  At night he contrived to wake for his strange courtship; and he had a peculiar ceremony when he got up in the dark and lit his candle.  From a steep and wild hillside, not far form the house, he had cut from time to time five large boughs of spiked and prickly gorse.  He had brought them into the house, one by one, and had hidden them in the big box that stood beside his bed.  Often he woke up weeping and murmuring to himself the words of one of his songs, and then when he had lit the