eans stave off this confession until he is stronger. It would kill
him to face a charge now. I am inquiring quietly, and, if anything
serious has happened, shall be sure to find out his connection with
it."

Though we rebelled against the Doctor's conclusions, we could not but
see the prudence of the course he advised, and so we sat down to
watch our poor little friend, gnawed with bitter anxiety, and feeling
a sad consciousness that the disease itself under which he suffered
was beyond our skilfullest surgery, and one that inevitably
threatened the saddest consequences. A man has grand powers of
recovery, so long as his _spirit_ is free; but let him once be
persuaded that his soul is chained down forever in adamantine
fetters, and, though, like Prometheus, he may endure with silence,
patience, even divinely, he is nevertheless utterly incapable of any
positive effort towards recuperation. His faith becomes, by a subtile
law of our being, his fact; the mountain is gifted with actual
motion, and rewards the temerity of his zeal by falling upon him and
crushing him forever. Such a person moves on, perchance, like a deep,
noble river, in calm and silence, but still moves on, inevitably
destined to lose himself in the common ocean. And this was the
promise of Clarian's case. Whatever was his hidden woe, however
trivial its rational results, or baseless its causes, it had beyond
remedy seized upon his soul, and we knew, that, unless it could be
done away with at the source, the end was certain: first the fury,
then the apathy of madness. He was no longer tortured with a visible
haunting presence, such as had borne him down on that fatal night,
but we saw plainly that he had taken the spectre into his own breast,
and nursed it, as a bosom serpent, upon his rapidly exhausting
energies.

Happily for us,--ere Clarian was quite beyond recovery, while Mac
still tore his hair in rage at his own impotence, while the Doctor
still pursued his researches with the sedateness of a philosopher,
and I was using what power I had to alleviate my little friend's
misery,--that subtile and mysterious agency, which, in our blindness
and need, we term Chance, interposed its offices, rolled away the
cloud from the mystery, and, like a good angel, rescued Clarian, even
as he was tottering upon the very brink of the dismal precipice to
whose borders he had innocently strayed.

I shall never forget that pleasant June day. It was the first time
t