the last half century; and it is unfair to affirm of them that they are positively this or that.  They are experiments.  They are the sons and victims of a desperate Energy, alluring by cheapness, satiating with quantity, that it may mount in the social scale, at the expense of their tissues.  The land is in a state of fermentation to mount, and the shop, which has shot half their stars to their social zenith, is what verily they would scald themselves to wash themselves free of.  Nor is it in any degree a reprehensible sign that they should fly as from hue and cry the title of tradesman.  It is on the contrary the spot of sanity, which bids us right cordially hope.  Energy, transferred to the moral sense, may clear them yet.

Meanwhile this beer, this wine, both are of a character to have killed more than the tempers of a less gifted people.  Martin Tinman invited Van Diemen Smith to try the flavour of a wine that, as he said, he thought of “laying down.”

It has been hinted before of a strange effect upon the minds of men who knew what they were going to, when they received an invitation to dine with Tinman.  For the sake of a little social meeting at any cost, they accepted it; accepted it with a sigh, midway as by engineering measurement between prospective and retrospective; as nearly mechanical as things human may be, like the Mussulman’s accustomed cry of Kismet.  Has it not been related of the little Jew babe sucking at its mother’s breast in Jerusalem, that this innocent, long after the Captivity, would start convulsively, relinquishing its feast, and indulging in the purest.  Hebrew lamentation of the most tenacious of races, at the passing sound of a Babylonian or a Ninevite voice?  In some such manner did men, unable to refuse, deep in what remained to them of nature, listen to Tinman; and so did Van Diemen, sighing heavily under the operation of simple animal instinct.

“You seem miserable,” said Tinman, not oblivious of his design to give his friend a fright.

“Do I?  No, I’m all right,” Van Diemen replied.  “I’m thinking of alterations at the Hall before Summer, to accommodate guests—­if I stay here.”

“I suppose you would not like to be separated from Annette.”

“Separated?  No, I should think I shouldn’t.  Who’d do it?”

“Because I should not like to leave my good sister Martha all to herself in a house so near the sea—­”

“Why not go to the Crouch, man?”

“Thank you.”

“No thanks needed if you don’t take advantage of the offer.”

They were at the entrance to Elba, whither Mr. Tinman was betaking himself to see his intended.  He asked if Annette was at home, and to his great stupefaction heard that she had gone to London for a week.

Dissembling the spite aroused within him, he postponed his very strongly fortified design, and said, “You must be lonely.”

Van Diemen informed him that it would be for a night only, as young Fellingham was coming down to keep him company.