He heard the mountain-song of the joyful water:  a wren-robin-thrush on the dance down of a faun; till it was caught and muted, and the silver foot slid along the channel, swift as moonbeams through a cloud, with an air of ‘Whither you will, so it be on’; happy for service as in freedom.  Then the yard of the inn below, and the rillwater twirling rounded through the trout-trough, subdued, still lively for its beloved onward:  dues to business, dues to pleasure; a wedding of the two, and the wisest on earth:-eh? like some one we know, and Nataly has made the comparison.  Fresh forellen for lunch:  rhyming to Fenellan, he had said to her; and that recollection struck the day to blaze; for his friend was a ruined military captain living on a literary quill at the time; and Nataly’s tender pleading, ’Could you not help to give him another chance, dear Victor?’—­signifying her absolute trust in his ability to do that or more or anything, had actually set him thinking of the Insurance Office; which he started to prosperity, and Fenellan in it, previously an untutored rill of the mountains, if ever was one.

Useless to be dwelling on holiday pictures:  Lakelands had hold of him!

Colney or somebody says, that the greater our successes, the greater the slaves we become.—­But we must have an aim, my friend, and success must be the aim of any aim!—­Yes, and, says Colney, you are to rejoice in the disappointing miss, which saved you from being damned by your bullet on the centre.—­You’re dead against Nature, old Colney.—­That is to carry the flag of Liberty.—­By clipping a limb!

Victor overcame the Pessimist in his own royal cranium-Court.  He entertained a pronounced dissension with bachelors pretending to independence.  It could not be argued publicly, and the more the pity:—­ for a slight encouragement, he would have done it:  his outlook over the waves of bachelors and (by present conditions mostly constrained) spinsters—­and another outlook, midnight upon Phlegethon to the thoughts of men, made him deem it urgent.  And it helped the plea in his own excuse, as Colney pointed out to the son of Nature.  That, he had to admit, was true.  He charged it upon Mrs. Burman, for twisting the most unselfish and noblest of his thoughts; and he promised himself it was to cease on the instant when the circumstance, which Nature was remiss in not bringing about to-day or to-morrow, had come to pass.  He could see his Nataly’s pained endurance beneath her habitual submission.  Her effort was a poor one, to conceal her dread of the day of the gathering at Lakelands.

On the Sunday previous to the day, Dr. Themison accompanied the amateurs by rail to Wrensham, to hear ‘trial of the acoustics’ of the Concert-hall.  They were a goodly company; and there was fun in the railway-carriage over Colney’s description of Fashionable London’s vast octopus Malady-monster, who was letting the doctor fly to the tether of its longest filament for an hour, plying suckers on him