or us, we were almost the only men of our own age she had seen
in that large dull house. But now the London season had broken up,
the house was filled; there was no longer that familiar and constant
approach to the mistress of the Hall which had made us like one family.
Great ladies, fine people were round her; a look, a smile, a passing
word were as much as I had a right to expect. And the talk, too, how
different! Before I could speak on books,--I was at home there! Roland
could pour forth his dreams, his chivalrous love for the past, his bold
defiance of the unknown future. And Ellinor, cultivated and fanciful,
could sympathize with both. And her father, scholar and gentleman, could
sympathize too. But now--"

CHAPTER VII.

"It is no use in the world," said my father, "to know all the languages
expounded in grammars and splintered up into lexicons, if we don't learn
the language of the world. It is a talk apart, Kitty," cried my father,
warming up. "It is an Anaglyph,--a spoken anaglyph, my dear! If all the
hieroglyphs of the Egyptians had been A B C to you, still, if you did
not know the anaglyph, you would know nothing of the true mysteries of
the priests. (1)

"Neither Roland nor I knew one symbol letter of the anaglyph. Talk,
talk, talk on persons we never heard of, things we never cared for. All
we thought of importance, puerile or pedantic trifles; all we thought so
trite and childish, the grand momentous business of life! If you found a
little schoolboy on his half-holiday fishing for minnows with a crooked
pin, and you began to tell him of all the wonders of the deep, the
laws of the tides, and the antediluvian relies of iguanodon and
ichthyosaurus; nay, if you spoke but of pearl fisheries and coral-banks,
or water-kelpies and naiads,--would not the little boy cry out
peevishly, 'Don't tease me with all that nonsense; let me fish in peace
for my minnows!' I think the little boy is right after his own way: it
was to fish for minnows that he came out, poor child, not to hear about
iguanodons and water-kelpies.

"So the company fished for minnows, and not a word could we say about
our pearl-fisheries and coral-banks! And as for fishing for minnows
ourselves, my dear boy, we should have been less bewildered if you had
asked us to fish for a mermaid! Do you see, now, one reason why I
have let you go thus early into the world? Well, but amongst these
minnow-fishers there was one who fished with an air tha