e enough for my big heart. In early youth,
if we find it difficult to control our feelings, so we find it difficult
to vent them in the presence of others. On the spring side of twenty,
if anything affects us, we rush to lock ourselves up in our room, or get
away into the streets or the fields; in our earlier years we are still
the savages of Nature, and we do as the poor brute does: the wounded
stag leaves the herd, and if there is anything on a dog's faithful
heart, he slinks away into a corner.

Accordingly, I stole out of the hotel and wandered through the streets,
which were quite deserted. It was about the first hour of dawn,--the
most comfortless hour there is, especially in London! But I only felt
freshness in the raw air, and soothing in the desolate stillness. The
love my uncle inspired was very remarkable in its nature; it was not
like that quiet affection with which those advanced in life must usually
content themselves, but connected with the more vivid interest that
youth awakens. There was in him still so much of viva, city and fire, in
his errors and crotchets so much of the self-delusion of youth, that
one could scarce fancy him other than young. Those Quixotic, exaggerated
notions of honor, that romance of sentiment which no hardship, care,
grief, disappointment, could wear away (singular in a period when, at
two and twenty, young men declare themselves blases!), seemed to leave
him all the charm of boyhood. A season in London had made me more a man
of the world, older in heart than he was. Then, the sorrow that gnawed
him with such silent sternness. No, Captain Roland was one of those men
who seize hold of your thoughts, who mix themselves up with your
lives. The idea that Roland should die,--die with the load at his heart
unlightened,--was one that seemed to take a spring out of the wheels of
nature, all object out of the aims of life,--of my life at least. For I
had made it one of the ends of my existence to bring back the son to
the father, and restore the smile, that must have been gay once, to the
downward curve of that iron lip. But Roland was now out of danger; and
yet, like one who has escaped shipwreck, I trembled to look back on the
danger past: the voice of the devouring deep still boomed in my ears.
While rapt in my reveries, I stopped mechanically to hear a clock
strike--four; and, looking round, I perceived that I had wandered from
the heart of the City, and was in one of the streets that