tell an occasional falsehood or act an
occasional hypocrisy, I am no worse than a secretary of legation of an
Old Bailey barrister.

The pleasure which I now take in the progress of this research is a
pleasure that is new to me: it is the stimulus which makes a breakneck
gallop across dreary fields gridironed with dykes and stone walls so
delicious to the sportsman; it is the stimulus which makes the task of
the mathematician sweet to him when he devotes laborious days to the
solution of an abstruse problem; it is the stimulus that sustains the
Indian trapper against all the miseries of cold and hunger, foul
weather, and aching limbs; it is the fever of the chase--that
inextinguishable fire which, once lighted in the human breast, is not
to be quenched until the hunt is ended.

I should like to earn three thousand pounds; but if I were to be none
the richer for my trouble, I think, now that I am so deeply involved in
this business, I should still go on. I want to fathom the mystery of
that midnight interment at Dewsdale; I want to know the story of that
Mary Haygarth who lies under the old yew-tree at Spotswold, and for
whose loss some one sorrowed without hope of consolation.

Was that a widower's commonplace, I wonder, and did the unknown mourner
console himself ultimately with a new wife? Who knows? as my Italian
friends say when they discuss the future of France. Shall I ever
penetrate that mystery of the past? My task seems to me almost as
hopeless as if George Sheldon had set me to hunt up the descendants of
King Solomon's ninety-ninth wife. A hundred years ago seems as far
away, for all practical purposes, as if it were on the other side of
the flood.

The letters are worth very little. They are prim and measured epistles,
and they relate much more to spiritual matters than to temporal
business. Mrs. Rebecca seems to have been so much concerned for the
health of her soul that she had very little leisure to think of
anything so insignificant as the bodies of other people. The letters
are filled with discourses upon her own state of mind; and the tone of
them reveals not a little of that pride whose character it is to
simulate humility. Mrs. Rebecca is always casting ashes on her head;
but she takes care to let her friend and pastor know what a saintly
head it is notwithstanding.

I have laid aside three of the most secular letters, which I selected
after wading through unnumbered pages of bewailings in the