Happy, thrice happy, were the months, and weeks, and hours of that year.  Friendship, hand in hand with admiration, tenderness and respect, built a bower of delight in my heart, late rough as an untrod wild in America, as the homeless wind or herbless sea.  Insatiate thirst for knowledge, and boundless affection for Adrian, combined to keep both my heart and understanding occupied, and I was consequently happy.  What happiness is so true and unclouded, as the overflowing and talkative delight of young people.  In our boat, upon my native lake, beside the streams and the pale bordering poplars—­in valley and over hill, my crook thrown aside, a nobler flock to tend than silly sheep, even a flock of new-born ideas, I read or listened to Adrian; and his discourse, whether it concerned his love or his theories for the improvement of man, alike entranced me.  Sometimes my lawless mood would return, my love of peril, my resistance to authority; but this was in his absence; under the mild sway of his dear eyes, I was obedient and good as a boy of five years old, who does his mother’s bidding.

After a residence of about a year at Ulswater, Adrian visited London, and came back full of plans for our benefit.  You must begin life, he said:  you are seventeen, and longer delay would render the necessary apprenticeship more and more irksome.  He foresaw that his own life would be one of struggle, and I must partake his labours with him.  The better to fit me for this task, we must now separate.  He found my name a good passport to preferment, and he had procured for me the situation of private secretary to the Ambassador at Vienna, where I should enter on my career under the best auspices.  In two years, I should return to my country, with a name well known and a reputation already founded.

And Perdita?—­Perdita was to become the pupil, friend and younger sister of Evadne.  With his usual thoughtfulness, he had provided for her independence in this situation.  How refuse the offers of this generous friend?—­I did not wish to refuse them; but in my heart of hearts, I made a vow to devote life, knowledge, and power, all of which, in as much as they were of any value, he had bestowed on me—­all, all my capacities and hopes, to him alone I would devote.

Thus I promised myself, as I journied towards my destination with roused and ardent expectation:  expectation of the fulfilment of all that in boyhood we promise ourselves of power and enjoyment in maturity.  Methought the time was now arrived, when, childish occupations laid aside, I should enter into life.  Even in the Elysian fields, Virgil describes the souls of the happy as eager to drink of the wave which was to restore them to this mortal coil.  The young are seldom in Elysium, for their desires, outstripping possibility, leave them as poor as a moneyless debtor.  We are told by the wisest philosophers of the dangers of the world, the deceits of men, and the treason of our own hearts:  but not the less fearlessly