“On that score I indulge no regrets.  General Darrington was the only father I ever knew, and since it was his wish, I shall gladly wear the name with which he endowed me, in grateful recognition of the affection, confidence and generous kindness he lavished upon me.  That the rich legacy he designed for me has been diverted into the channel of all others most repugnant to him, is my misfortune, not his fault; for ho took every possible precaution to secure my inheritance.  Had I been indeed his own son, he could not have done more, and I have a son’s right to mourn sincerely over his cruel and untimely end.”

The two men sat on the front steps at “Elm Bluff”, and as Prince’s eyes wandered over the exceeding beauty of the “great greenery” of velvet lawn, the stately, venerable growth of forest trees, wearing the adolescent mask of tender young foliage, the outlying fields flanking the park, the sunny acres now awave with crinkling mantles of grain, he sighed very heavily at the realization of all that adverse fortune had snatched away.

Blond as Baldur of the Voluspa, with a wealth of golden brown beard veiling his lips and chin, he appeared far more than six years the junior of the clear cut, smoothly shaven face that belonged to his prospective brother-in-law; and their countenances contrasted as vividly as the portraiture of bland phlegmatic Norse Aesir, with some bronze image of Mercury, as keenly alert as his sacred symbolic cocks.

Strolling leisurely through the flowery decoying fields, that beckon all around the outskirts of the vast, lonely wilderness of positive Science, the dewy freshness of the youthful amateur still clung to Prince’s garments; even as souvenirs gathered by flitting Summer tourists prattle of glimpses of wild, towering fastnesses, where strewn bones of martyr pioneers whiten as monuments of failure.  In the guise of a green-kirtled enchantress, with wild poppies and primroses wreathed above her starry eyes, Science was luring him through the borderland of her kingdom, toward that dark, chill, central realm where, transformed as a gnome, she clutches her votaries, plunges into the primeval abyss-the matrix of time—­and sets them the Egyptian task of weighing, analyzing the Titanic “potential” energy, the infinitesimal atomic engines, the “kinetic” force, the chemical motors, the subtle intangible magnetic currents, whereby in the thundering, hissing, whirling laboratory of Nature, nebulae grow into astral and solar systems; the prophetic floral forms of crystals become, after disintegration, instinct with organic vegetable germs,—­and the Sphinx Life—­blur-eyed—­deaf, blind, sets forth on her slow evolutionary journey through the wastes of aeons; mounting finally into that throne of rest fore-ordained through groping ages, crowned with the soul of Shakspeare, sceptred with the brain of Newton.