he
rear of his appearance.

Christopher was now over five-and-twenty. He was getting so well
accustomed to the spectacle of a world passing him by and splashing him
with its wheels that he wondered why he had ever minded it. His habit of
dreaming instead of doing had led him up to a curious discovery. It is
no new thing for a man to fathom profundities by indulging humours: the
active, the rapid, the people of splendid momentum, have been surprised
to behold what results attend the lives of those whose usual plan for
discharging their active labours has been to postpone them indefinitely.
Certainly, the immediate result in the present case was, to all but
himself, small and invisible; but it was of the nature of highest things.
What he had learnt was that a woman who has once made a permanent
impression upon a man cannot altogether deny him her image by denying him
her company, and that by sedulously cultivating the acquaintance of this
Creature of Contemplation she becomes to him almost a living soul. Hence
a sublimated Ethelberta accompanied him everywhere--one who never teased
him, eluded him, or disappointed him: when he smiled she smiled, when he
was sad she sorrowed. He may be said to have become the literal
duplicate of that whimsical unknown rhapsodist who wrote of his own
similar situation--

'By absence this good means I gain,
That I can catch her,
Where none can watch her,
In some close corner of my brain:
There I embrace and kiss her;
And so I both enjoy and miss her.'

This frame of mind naturally induced an amazing abstraction in the
organist, never very vigilant at the best of times. He would stand and
look fixedly at a frog in a shady pool, and never once think of
batrachians, or pause by a green bank to split some tall blade of grass
into filaments without removing it from its stalk, passing on ignorant
that he had made a cat-o'-nine-tails of a graceful slip of vegetation. He
would hear the cathedral clock strike one, and go the next minute to see
what time it was. 'I never seed such a man as Mr. Julian is,' said the
head blower. 'He'll meet me anywhere out-of-doors, and never wink or
nod. You'd hardly expect it. I don't find fault, but you'd hardly
expect it, seeing how I play the same instrument as he do himself, and
have done it for so many years longer than he. How I have indulged that
man, too! If 'tis Pedals for two martel hours of practice I never