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grown people tolerating and even delighting in childish fables about gods and goddesses, and the impossible adventures of Trojans and Greeks, while the exploits of Jack the Giant Killer and Bluebeard were very properly left to the nursery. It was hopeless to try and please him in story books. The Arabian Nights he threw down and stamped upon in a passion of tears and disgust and indignation, after five minutes perusal. Andersen's fairy tales fared no better. He returned them to his mother, as good for an infant school perhaps, but not for a boy of his years. In all his lessons, with a growing aptitude for learning, he showed a growing indifference to its aims and ends.

Neither was he fond of games. Exercise, which he could prove by experiment to be necessary for health and appetite, he consented to take, but for cricket, football, and all who could be keen upon such sham fights, he had nothing but ridicule. How could his father wish any reasonable child to fritter away his time and pocketmoney, or expose his person, for the sake of such brief and hollow joys as were all these boyish victories could afford?

He was tall and strong himself, and one day his mother, admiring and exulting in his sturdy health, happened to remark that he had been the most feeble and delicate of babies, and reared only by unremitting care and pains. The boy listened thoughtfully, sympathetically, but suddenly startled her by replying that for her it was a misfortune not to have lived in ancient times, or other countries, when and where he would have been exposed to perish in infancy, as a matter of course, and she have been saved the bother and responsibility of rearing him at all.

Upon this Mrs. Ichabod, thoroughly frightened, rose, went

straight to her husband and told him that John's precocity was becoming so alarming that he must go to a public school at once. Public schools are known as the certain grave for all the most insufferable eccentricities of young genius. Master Ichabod's must go their way like all others. Merged in a crowd of five hundred ordinaries, he fell in pretty readily with their manners and customs, to the unspeakable relief of his parents both.

But his oddities were only buried, not dead, as it needed but to watch him closely to discover. He was lucky in his tutor, a man of genial intelligence, who from the first had taken a curious interest in the boy, and built great hopes on a lad who learnt so quickly and conducted himself so irreproachably. There were drawbacks, though, and drawbacks undreamt of in the philosophy of his experience. Who ever knew a clever fellow keep so provokingly aloof from any kind of competition? He was always up to the mark in the examinations, but never entered the lists for a prize if he could help it, or showed one spark of ardour on such occasions. It was all a riddle to his tutor, who often bantered him about this want of emulation, but always got the worst of the argument. "Either," said the pupil," learning was useful or it wasn't. If it wasn't, why work one's head off for the sake of a trumpery medal or book? If it was, well, use was better than the honour and glory of victory any day; so to put these forward as a motive at all was just to carry coals to Newcastle."

He must infallibly have been squashed as a prig by his schoolfellows, but he took care to keep his ideas to himself, never spoke out his mind unless pressed to do so, and was quite content, so far, with acting up to it.

He was in his seventeenth year when his mother died, rather suddenly. He had been much attached to her, yet, after the first shock, he did not give way so far as to betray any agitation. But still waters run deep, and his tutor suspected that so undemonstrative an exterior must hide feelings of dangerous intensity. Finding him one day brooding, he feared, over his grief, he laid his hand on his shoulder, asking kindly, "What are you thinking of, Ichabod ?" and with sympathy and consolation on the tip of his tongue. Master Ichabod, who always spoke the truth, replied, "I was thinking of what I heard yesterday, that my mother's fortune will be mine now when I come of age; and I believe it is a great thing not to be dependent, or tied down to anybody in the world."

The tutor was an impulsive man, and the hardness of the speech startled him and made him shrink. Nor could the pupil bring him to see the matter in another light; not by the most sincere assurances that he meant to use the money well, and for the good of the human race, which his mother, with her fanciful tastes and thoughtless charities, had never done.

As he grew older he began to exercise a curious influence over some of his schoolfellows. Little did he seem to care for their regard, and still less for their affection; but his indifference had only the effect of attracting both. Before he left he found himself a kind of pope over a small set, who looked up to him as to the ne plus ultra of boyish infallibility. At eighteen he came home, bearing as first-rate a character, both in and out of school, as fond father's heart could desire.

The next day brought the father a cold shower-bath in the form of a letter of advice from his son's tutor.

The gist of it was plain enough, at all events: "Send your boy away to travel across the Atlantic if you can-the farther the better. Give him a change that must shake his whole being. He is young, and there may still be time.'

Mr. Ichabod, senior, thought he must be dreaming. But no; there were the words. He read on:

"My reason for this advice is not so easy to put into words. My feeling is that he is in a dangerous way. I seem to perceive a morbid taint in his mind that he delights to honour and foster as much as he can. I may call it a depreciative mania. He is always inventing a fly in his honey, a flaw in his precious stone. Such a theory of life it is becoming common to hear preached; but I never before saw anyone carry it out thus in practice, inexorably, like your son. He is

a boy now, so this can only show itself in trifles; but if in after life he applies his principle to vitalities, and follows it out as consistently as now, I would rather not say what I think it may, or must, lead."

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Here Mr. Ichabod's surprise, which amounted to stupor, exploded in a hearty laugh. "I see it all now," he said; my boy's precocity has frightened his tutor, as when he was a child once it frightened me. I must reassure the man." He took up his pen and wrote back at once:

"I thank you for your advice, which I take as kindly as it was meant. But with regard to my son's peculiarities, you must remember that we live in a sceptical age, and our children must breathe its air. What can be the terrible consequences that threaten in this instance I cannot imagine. Had they shown themselves in any vicious tendencies in the boy we should have a right to be uneasy about him. But what is poison to certain characters may be meat to

steady and harmless natures like his. You say he has talents and application besides, so I trust confidently to him to make you smile some day over your gloomy forebodings.'

They were soon forgotten. Young Ichabod passed on to the University, and went through his course with credit, if not distinction. There, as at school, he attracted round him a circle of staunch friends. They were mostly his intellectual inferiors and his

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opposites young fellows who, seeing in him one unlike themselves, ' not passion's slave," thought highly of him on that account. He did not return the compliment, and no wonder. How, in his heart of hearts, he despised their small talk, their little ambitions, their little fads, their little loves and hates! But then they would listen and look up to him, and Ichabod liked to receive, though he hated to render, homage.

One virtue he had: a rare independence of character which might fairly claim respect. It was not so much this, however, as a less

reasonable attraction-the attraction of strangeness-that drew most of them to his side.

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"A capital fellow," said his friends, when defending him; "neither by force nor by flattery could you make him move inch out of his way." His enemies complained that he was equally deaf to all the generous emotions. But in what, after all, do the "generous emotions at the University for the most part evince themselves? Fattening the tradesmen, fleecing your family, calf-love, and idleness. "No great loss either," thought his parent, naturally. "If his habit of mind is still over-serious for his age, that will soon brush off when once he gets into practical life."

Meaning some active profession,

society, matrimony, and the everlasting happiness that is understood to ensue.

But the young man's entry into this land of promise, the father, for one, was never to witness, dying shortly before his son's college career was concluded.

CHAPTER II.

ICHABOD was six-and-twenty, clever, well spoken of, well connected, and well off. Old people, poor people, obscure people, all envied and talked of him as a made man. Bigwigs praised, mammas flattered, daughters beamed upon this heir-presumptive of-what, was still an open quession, but a brilliant future of some kind for him they agreed to take for granted.

From his successful college career he had passed on to the study of the law. When called to the bar he established himself in chambers in London, and became a subject of conjecture, even of an airy bet or two among his own set at the Junior Highflyers' Club. What was the special course his legal energies were going to take? He will get into Parliament," said one; a junior of juniors, he.

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never really dived into a single stream of business or of pleasure, or got beyond tasting and skimming the surface of each, before he turned away to another, as if trying them one by one, and finding them all wanting. After an apprenticeship of several seasons, there came a change so great and so unexpected as to amaze his friends, who could make nothing of it. Reserved and impassive he had always been-that was his way; but now he had suddenly given up any show of interest in the world (which was a bad sign enough), and in its wife too (which was worse), turned silent and morose, and shut himself up, literally and figuratively, like any misanthrope or old monk of ages

ago.

Their surprise and disapproval found vent in fresh conjectures and fresh bets at the Junior Highflyers.

"He has been to a revival meeting," said one.

"Joined the International," said the youngest member.

"Or been speculating," said the practical man.

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Engaged," said the fiancé of two years back, now a family man himself, and the soul of the exbachelor exulted.

But how were they to find out,— how to confess a man who, though on familiar terms with all of them, was not intimate with one? Dick Hammond, formerly his fellowcollegian, a gentleman of a bold. spirit and insinuating manners, and perhaps the most inquisitive of the set, laid a wager that he would clear up the mystery. He had a great opinion of Ichabod, who knew it, and would unbend to him if to anyone. "If there's a skeleton," said Hammond, "ten to one that I'll find the key of the cupboard, and come back and tell you what's inside.”

The first step was to invite himself to wine at Ichabod's chambers. That, for Hammond, was easy, and thither, on the evening he had chosen, he betook himself, confident of success. Ichabod, he could feel, was not over-pleased to see him; but then Hammond's object in coming was not to be welcome. "How shall I draw him out?" was the question occupying him tonight.

The two men, as they sat there opposite each other, in spite of the varnish of polite society which overlaid them both, were as different as wax from steel, flame from frost. Hammond, tall, slim, flexible, slippery-the light comedian of the stage of life, a man who adapted himself to everything without an effort and found his own level everywhere directly. Launched in the solar system of London society, he desired nothing better than to play his part as sun, or star, or satellite, at clubs, balls, dinners, operas, and for as many seasons as a man generally cares to look forward to.

And Ichabod.

Asleep or dead, he might have been pronounced good looking. The features were excellent, but it was a face of which the spirit, so to speak, seemed perpetually protesting against the flesh. And that spirit was certainly one that might harden the finest mould, grizzle a young man's hair, and dull the liveliest eye. The expression never relaxed nor changed. The face was a monochord, and Hammond hunted in vain to make out the right note.

"If only I were an American interviewer," thought he, "or a woman, I should know all about it in half-an-hour." But he had neither the effrontery of the first nor the tact of the second. He beat about the bush to no purpose till he began to fear he should

lose his wager. He looked up and down the room for hints and inspiration, but got no further than the certainty that all the club guesses had been wrong. Those chambers looked just as usual, and how luxurious, how superlative superlative that was! The easy chairs, prints, books, and especially the bindings, made Hammond's mouth water. For even he was not perfectly happy. As he jestingly expressed it, he had "a soul above his income." There was so much that seemed to him worth buying, one's banking account permitting, in Vanity Fair.

"You are the luckiest fellow," he exclaimed mournfully-for the moment his errand was forgotten"and I don't think you're half as thankful as you ought to be for your advantages."

"My what?" asked Ichabod, incredulously, raising his eyebrows.

"Oh, don't be modest, or pretend to run them down. Everything that fellows like myself haven't got, and covet-good looks, talent, interest, means," with a stress upon means.

"Oh, bah," said Ichabod impatiently, "you may skip the rest of the catalogue. After all, the first painter you pick up will compose you a better face than mine out of sulphate of mercury and chromate of lead. And as for what

you are pleased to call talents and means, believe me they are as hollow, doubtful blessings as any on the list."

"He has been to a revival meeting, by Jove!" thought Hammond aghast, "but I think I'm on the scent, and will follow it up. Nonsense," he replied aloud. "Couldn't desire a better position than yours. A young man of mark, with nothing to hamper him, and all the world opening before him where to

choose.'

"Yes, and what a nice view!" broke in Ichabod, laughing. "Remember whom you're quoting. Robinson Crusoe to his desert island. Capital! Free to choose between the hurricane on the sea and the cannibals on land-the sterile sands and the pestilential marsh-the lucky fellow, eh ?"

"Don't," muttered Hammond, involuntarily, half startled by the vehement irony of his friend's tone.

"Hammond," resumed Ichabod, "I sometimes wonder what you think, if ever men like you do think at all, which is questionable, about the planet we live in. That it's a very good sort of world on the whole, as worlds go, I suppose, and so on."

"He's coming out," thought Hammond, cheerfully. "No," he replied aloud reflectively, "that's not my idea. A dozen times I may have sworn to myself that it is a sad sight, a sink of iniquity, a place of torment, et cetera; and so it is, but with compensations, you know, that make up for anything. Call it a swine's snout, if you like; there are jewels of gold that seem like the raw material of a heaven."

Ichabod got up impatiently, and began pacing the room. "The old, old story," he exclaimed, "that has been dinned into men's ears wherever there were priests or poets or philanthropists, and fools to listen to them; and so it goes on to this day! My only wish, if I had a wish, would be to see life started afresh on a rational basis, and idolatry and superstition abolished."

"Idolatry, superstition-what on earth are you talking about? asked Hammond, in frank amazement. "Where the deuce do you find them? Not here in London, at the West-end, in this year of grace eighteen hundred and seventy.

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