d. And after so
great a gap in his matrimonial felicity--when his death was reckoned
certain, his estate settled, his name dismissed from memory and his
wife long, long ago resigned to her autumnal widowhood--he entered the
door one evening quietly as from a day's absence, and became a loving
spouse till death.

This outline is all that I remember. But the incident, though of the
purest originality, unexampled, and probably never to be repeated, is
one, I think, which appeals to the general sympathies of mankind. We
know, each for himself, that none of us would perpetrate such a folly,
yet feel as if some other might. To my own contemplations, at least,
it has often recurred, always exciting wonder, but with a sense that
the story must be true and a conception of its hero's character.
Whenever any subject so forcibly affects the mind, time is well spent
in thinking of it. If the reader choose, let him do his own
meditation; or if he prefer to ramble with me through the twenty years
of Wakefield's vagary, I bid him welcome, trusting that there will be
a pervading spirit and a moral, even should we fail to find them, done
up neatly and condensed into the final sentence. Thought has always
its efficacy and every striking incident its moral.

What sort of a man was Wakefield? We are free to shape out our own
idea and call it by his name. He was now in the meridian of life; his
matrimonial affections, never violent, were sobered into a calm,
habitual sentiment; of all husbands, he was likely to be the most
constant, because a certain sluggishness would keep his heart at rest
wherever it might be placed. He was intellectual, but not actively so;
his mind occupied itself in long and lazy musings that tended to no
purpose or had not vigor to attain it; his thoughts were seldom so
energetic as to seize hold of words. Imagination, in the proper
meaning of the term, made no part of Wakefield's gifts. With a cold
but not depraved nor wandering heart, and a mind never feverish with
riotous thoughts nor perplexed with originality, who could have
anticipated that our friend would entitle himself to a foremost place
among the doers of eccentric deeds? Had his acquaintances been asked
who was the man in London the surest to perform nothing to-day which
should be remembered on the morrow, they would have thought of
Wakefield. Only the wife of his bosom might have hesitated. She,
without having analyzed his character, was partly aware o