“All that does not prevent my lot from being a very melancholy one!” said Flemming sadly.

“O, never mind the lot,” cried Berkley laughing, “so long as you don’t get Lot’s wife.  If the cucumber is bitter, throw it away, as the philosopher Marcus Antoninus says, in his Meditations.  Forget her, and all will be as if you had not known her.”

“I shall never forget her,” replied Flemming, rather solemnly.  “Not my pride, but my affections, are wounded; and the wound is too deep ever to heal.  I shall carry it with me always.  I enter no more into the world, but will dwell only in the world of my own thoughts.  All great and unusual occurrences, whether of joy or sorrow, lift us above this earth; and we should do well always to preserve this elevation.  Hitherto I have not done so.  But now I will no more descend; I will sit apart and above the world, with my mournful, yet holy thoughts.”

“Whew!  You had better go into society; the whirl and delirium will cure you in a week.  If you find a lady, who pleases you very much, and you wish to marry her, and she will not listen to such a horrid thing, I see but one remedy, which is to find another, who pleases you more, and who will listen to it.”

“No, my friend; you do not understand my character,” said Flemming, shaking his head.  “I love this woman with a deep, and lasting affection.  I shall never cease to love her.  This may be madness in me; but so it is.  Alas and alas!  Paracelsus of old wasted life in trying to discover its elixir, which after all turned out to be alcohol; and instead of being made immortal upon earth, he died drunk on the floor of a tavern.  The like happens to many of us.  We waste our best years in distilling the sweetest flowers of life into love-potions, which after all do not immortalize, butonly intoxicate us.  By Heaven! we are all of us mad.”

“But are you sure the case is utterly hopeless?”

“Utterly! utterly!”

“And yet I perceive you have not laid aside all hope.  You still flatter yourself, that the lady’s heart may change.  The great secret of happiness consists not in enjoying, but in renouncing.  But it is hard, very hard.  Hope has as many lives as a cat or a king.  I dare say you have heard the old Italian proverb, ‘The King never dies.’  But perhaps you have never heard, that, at the court of Naples, where the dead body of a monarch lies in state, his dinner is carried up to him as usual, and the court physician tastes it, to see that it be not poisoned, and then the servants bear it out again, saying ‘The King does not dine to-day.’  Hope in our souls is King; and we also say, ‘The King never dies.’  Even when in reality he lies dead within us, in a kind of solemn mockery we offer him his accustomed food, but are constrainedto say, ’The King does not dine to-day.’  It must be an evil day, indeed, when a king of Naples has no heart for his dinner! but you yourself are a proof, that the King never dies.  You are feeding your King, although you say he is dead.”