I'm sure," said
the land lady, courtesying; "I know what gentlefolk be. I've been a
housekeeper in the first of families in this very shire, sir, though I
can't say I've served in Lunnon; and so, as gentlefolks know each other,
I 've no doubt you could find out her relations. Dear, dear! Coming,
coming!"

Here there were loud cries for the hostess, and she hurried away. The
farmers and drovers were beginning to depart, and their bills were to be
made out and paid. Leonard saw his hostess no more that night. The last
Hip-hip-hurrah was heard,--some toast, perhaps to the health of the
county members,--and the chamber of woe beside Leonard's rattled with
the shout. By and by, silence gradually succeeded the various dissonant
sounds below. The carts and gigs rolled away; the clatter of hoofs on
the road ceased; there was then a dumb dull sound as of locking-up, and
low, humming voices below, and footsteps mounting the stairs to bed,
with now and then a drunken hiccough or maudlin laugh, as some conquered
votary of Bacchus was fairly carried up to his domicile.

All, then, at last was silent, just as the clock from the church sounded
the stroke of eleven.

Leonard, meanwhile, had been looking over his manuscripts. There was
first a project for an improvement on the steam-engine,--a project that
had long lain in his mind, begun with the first knowledge of mechanics
that he had gleaned from his purchases of the tinker. He put that
aside now,--it required too great an effort of the reasoning faculty to
re-examine.

He glanced less hastily over a collection of essays on various
subjects,--some that he thought indifferent, some that he thought good.
He then lingered over a collection of verses written in his best hand
with loving care,--verses first inspired by his perusal of Nora's
melancholy memorials. These verses were as a diary of his heart and his
fancy,--those deep, unwitnessed struggles which the boyhood of all more
thoughtful natures has passed in its bright yet murky storm of the cloud
and the lightning-flash, though but few boys pause to record the crisis
from which slowly emerges Man. And these first desultory grapplings with
the fugitive airy images that flit through the dim chambers of the
brain had become with each effort more sustained and vigorous, till the
phantoms were spelled, the flying ones arrested, the Immaterial seized,
and clothed with Form. Gazing on his last effort, Leonard felt that
there at len