’The ouzel-cock so black of hue,
        With orange-tawny bill;
        The rascal with his aim so true;
        The Poet’s little quill!’

“Where’s the moral of that? except that all’s game to the poet!  Certainly we have a noble example of the devotedness of the female, who for three entire days refuses to make herself heard, on account of a defunct male.  I suppose that’s what Ricky dwells on.”

“As you please, my dear Adrian,” says Richard, and points out larch-buds to his uncle, as they ride by the young green wood.

The wise youth was driven to extremity.  Such a lapse from his pupil’s heroics to this last verge of Arcadian coolness, Adrian could not believe in.  “Hark at this old blackbird!” he cried, in his turn, and pretending to interpret his fits of song: 

“Oh, what a pretty comedy!—­Don’t we wear the mask well, my Fiesco?—­Genoa will be our own to-morrow!—­Only wait until the train has started—­jolly! jolly! jolly!  We’ll be winners yet!

“Not a bad verse—­eh, Ricky? my Lucius Junius!”

“You do the blackbird well,” said Richard, and looked at him in a manner mildly affable.

Adrian shrugged.  “You’re a young man of wonderful powers,” he emphatically observed; meaning to say that Richard quite beat him; for which opinion Richard gravely thanked him, and with this they rode into Bellingham.

There was young Tom Blaize at the station, in his Sunday beaver and gala waistcoat and neckcloth, coming the lord over Tom Bakewell, who had preceded his master in charge of the baggage.  He likewise was bound for London.  Richard, as he was dismounting, heard Adrian say to the baronet:  “The Beast, sir, appears to be going to fetch Beauty;” but he paid no heed to the words.  Whether young Tom heard them or not, Adrian’s look took the lord out of him, and he shrunk away into obscurity, where the nearest approach to the fashions which the tailors of Bellingham could supply to him, sat upon him more easily, and he was not stiffened by the eyes of the superiors whom he sought to rival.  The baronet, Lady Blandish, and Adrian remained on horseback, and received Richard’s adieux across the palings.  He shook hands with each of them in the same kindly cold way, elicitating from Adrian a marked encomium on his style of doing it.  The train came up, and Richard stepped after his uncle into one of the carriages.

Now surely there will come an age when the presentation of science at war with Fortune and the Fates, will be deemed the true epic of modern life; and the aspect of a scientific humanist who, by dint of incessant watchfulness, has maintained a System against those active forties, cannot be reckoned less than sublime, even though at the moment he but sit upon his horse, on a fine March morning such as this, and smile wistfully to behold the son of his heart, his System incarnate, wave a serene adieu to tutelage, neither too eager