Not being allowed to impart the distressing dose of comfort he was charged with, he swallowed it himself; and these were the consequences.  And an uneasy sleep was traditionally a matter for grave debate in the Radnor family.  The Duvidney ladies, Dorothea and Virginia, would have cited ancestral names, showing it to be the worst of intimations.  At night, lying on his back beneath a weight of darkness, one heavily craped figure, distinguishable through the gloom, as a blot on a black pad, accused the answering darkness within him, until his mind was dragged to go through the whole case by morning light; and the compassionate man appealed to common sense, to stamp and pass his delectable sophistries; as, that it was his intense humaneness, which exposed him to an accusation of inhumanity; his prayer for the truly best to happen, which anticipated Mrs. Burman’s expiry.  They were simple sophistries, fabricated to suit his needs, readily taking and bearing the imprimatur of common sense.  They refreshed him, as a chemical scent a crowded room.

All because he could not open his breast to Nataly, by reason of her feebleness; or feel enthusiasm in the possession of young Dudley!  A dry stick indeed beside him on the walk Westward.  Good quality wood, no doubt, but dry, varnished for conventional uses.  Poor dear Fredi would have to crown it like the May-day posy of the urchins of Craye Farm and Creckholt!

Dudley wished the great City-merchant to appreciate him as a diligent student of commercial matters:  rivalries of Banks; Foreign and Municipal Loans, American Rails, and Argentine; new Companies of wholesome appearance or sinister; or starting with a dram in the stomach, or born to bleat prostrate, like sheep on their backs in a ditch; Trusts and Founders; Breweries bursting vats upon the markets, and England prone along the gutters, gobbling, drunk for shares, and sober in the possession of certain of them.  But when, as Colney says, a grateful England has conferred the Lordship on her Brewer, he gratefully hands-over the establishment to his country; and both may disregard the howls of a Salvation Army of shareholders.—­Beaten by the Germans in Brewery, too!  Dr. Schlesien has his right to crow.  We were ahead of them, and they came and studied us, and they studied Chemistry as well; while we went on down our happy-go-lucky old road; and then had to hire their young Professors, and then to import their beer.

Have the Germans more brains than we English?  Victor’s blood up to the dome of his cranium knocked the patriotic negative.  But, as old Colney says (and bother him, for constantly intruding!), the comfortably successful have the habit of sitting, and that dulls the brain yet more than it eases the person:  hence are we outpaced; we have now to know we are racing.  Victor scored a mark for one of his projects.  A well-conducted Journal of the sharpest pens in the land might, at a sacrifice of money grandly sunk, expose to his English how and