rough Bois l'Etang.

He sat and thought, and while he thought, we heard them all coming
down-stairs.

"Are they going to interrupt?" said he, glancing at the door with an
annoyed expression.

"They will not come here," I answered; for we were in the little salon
where Madame never sat in the evening, and where it was by mere chance
that heat was still lingering in the stove. They passed the door and
went on to the salle-a-manger.

"Now," he pursued, "they will talk about thieves, burglars, and so on:
let them do so--mind you say nothing, and keep your resolution of
describing your nun to nobody. She may appear to you again: don't
start."

"You think then," I said, with secret horror, "she came out of my
brain, and is now gone in there, and may glide out again at an hour and
a day when I look not for her?"

"I think it a case of spectral illusion: I fear, following on and
resulting from long-continued mental conflict."

"Oh, Doctor John--I shudder at the thought of being liable to such an
illusion! It seemed so real. Is there no cure?--no preventive?"

"Happiness is the cure--a cheerful mind the preventive: cultivate both."

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being
told to _cultivate_ happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is
not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness
is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew
which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon
it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.

"Cultivate happiness!" I said briefly to the doctor: "do _you_
cultivate happiness? How do you manage?"

"I am a cheerful fellow by nature: and then ill-luck has never dogged
me. Adversity gave me and my mother one passing scowl and brush, but we
defied her, or rather laughed at her, and she went by.".

"There is no cultivation in all this."

"I do not give way to melancholy."

"Yes: I have seen you subdued by that feeling."

"About Ginevra Fanshawe--eh?"

"Did she not sometimes make you miserable?"

"Pooh! stuff! nonsense! You see I am better now."

If a laughing eye with a lively light, and a face bright with beaming
and healthy energy, could attest that he was better, better he
certainly was.

"You do not look much amiss, or greatly out of condition," I allowed.

"And why, Lucy, can't you look and feel as I do--buoyant, courageous,
and fit to defy all the nuns an