Hippias, with a half-seduced smile, "mind your dishes are
not too savoury!"

"Light food and claret! Regular meals and amusement! Lend your heart to
all, but give it to none!" exclaims young Wisdom, and Hippias mutters,
"Yes! yes!" and intimates that the origin of his malady lay in his not
following that maxim earlier.

"Love ruins us, my dear boy," he said, thinking to preach Richard a
lesson, and Richard boisterously broke out:

"The love of Monsieur Francatelli,
It was the ruin of--et coetera."

Hippias blinked, exclaiming, "Really, my dear boy! I never saw you so
excited."

"It's the railway! It's the fun, uncle!"

"Ah!" Hippias wagged a melancholy head, "you've got the Golden Bride!
Keep her if you can. That's a pretty fable of your father's. I gave him
the idea, though. Austin filches a great many of my ideas!"

"Here's the idea in verse, uncle:

'O sunless walkers by the tide!
O have you seen the Golden Bride!
They say that she is fair beyond
All women; faithful, and more fond!

"You know, the young inquirer comes to a group of penitent sinners by
the brink of a stream. They howl, and answer:

Faithful she is, but she forsakes:
And fond, yet endless woe she makes:
And fair! but with this curse she's cross'd;
To know her not till she is lost!'

"Then the doleful party march off in single file solemnly, and the
fabulist pursues:

'She hath a palace in the West:
Bright Hesper lights her to her rest:
And him the Morning Star awakes
Whom to her charmed arms she takes.

So lives he till he sees, alas!
The maids of baser metal pass.'

"And prodigal of the happiness she lends him, he asks to share it with
one of them. There is the Silver Maid, and the Copper, and the Brassy
Maid, and others of them. First, you know, he tries Argentine, and finds
her only twenty to the pound, and has a worse experience with Copperina,
till he descends to the scullery; and the lower he goes, the less
obscure become the features of his Bride of Gold, and all her radiance
shines forth, my uncle."

"Verse rather blunts the point. Well, keep to her, now you've got her,"
says Hippias.

"We will, uncle!--Look how the farms fly past! Look at the cattle in the
fields! And how the lines duck, and swim up!

'She claims the whole, and not the part--
The coin of an unused heart!
To gain