be back before dinner-time. Not sorry to
have a little time to myself, I retired to my room, and threw myself
down on a most comfortable sofa, excessively well satisfied with the
locality and well disposed to take advantage of my good fortune. The
little bed, with its snow-white curtains and gilded canopy; the brass
dogs upon the hearth, that shone like gold; the cherry-wood table, that
might have served as a mirror; the modest book-shelf, with its pleasant
row of volumes; but, better than all, the open window, from which I
could see for miles over the top of a dark forest, and watch the Meuse
as it came and went, now shining, now lost in the recesses of the
wood--all charmed me; and I fully confessed what I have had very
frequently to repeat in life, that 'Arthur O'Leary was born under a
lucky planet.'

CHAPTER XII. CHATEAU LIFE

Stretched upon a large old-fashioned sofa, where a burgomaster might
have reclined with 'ample room and verge enough,' in all the easy
abandonment of dressing-gown and slippers; the cool breeze gently
wafting the window-blind to and fro, and tempering the lulling sounds
from wood and water; the buzzing of the summer insects and the far-off
carol of a peasant's song--I fell into one of those delicious sleeps in
which dreams are so faintly marked as to leave us no disappointment
on waking: flitting shadowlike before the mind, they live only in a
pleasant memory of something vague and undefined, and impart no touch
of sorrow for expectations unfulfilled, for hopes that are not to be
realised. I would that my dreams might always take this shape. It is
a sad thing when they become tangible; when features and looks, eyes,
hands, words, and signs, live too strongly in our sleeping minds, and we
awake to the cold reality of our daily cares and crosses, tenfold less
endurable from very contrast. No! give me rather the faint and waving
outline, the shadowy perception of pleasure, than the vivid picture, to
end only in the conviction that I am but Christopher Sly after all; or
what comes pretty much to the same, nothing but--Arthur O'Leary.

Still, I would not have you deem me discontented with my lot; far from
it. I chose my path early in life, and never saw reason to regret the
choice. How many of you can say as much? I felt that while the tender
ties of home and family, the charities that grow up around the charmed
circle of a wife and children, are the great prizes of life, there are
also a