ere was little of all
that left now, and though the stalwart frame was stronger and tougher in
its manly proportions, and the yellow beard grown long and curly, and
the hair as thick as ever, the flush of youth was gone; and Dr. Claudius
leaned out of his high window and smelled the river breeze, and said to
himself it was not so sweet as it used to be, and that, for all he only
had thirty summers behind him, he was growing old--very old; and that
was why he did not care to spend more than half-an-hour of an evening
with Dr. Wiener and Dr. Wurst.

In truth it was an unnatural life for a man just reaching his prime, and
full of imagination and talent and love for the beautiful. But he had
fallen into the philosophical groove of study which sooner or later
seems to absorb so many gifted minds, only to lay them waste in nine
cases out of ten. A brilliant mathematician, he had taken his doctorate
without difficulty, and his thesis had even attracted some attention.
From the higher speculations of modern mathematics to the study of
philosophy is but a step, and Claudius had plunged into the vast sea of
Kant, Spinoza, and Hegel, without, perhaps, having any very definite
idea of what he was doing, until he found himself forced to go forward
or to acknowledge himself baffled and beaten. This he was not willing to
do, and so he had gone on and on, until one day, some six months ago, he
had asked himself what it all led to? why he had laboured so hard for
years over such things? whether the old free life and ready enjoyment
were not better than this midnight prowling among other people's
thoughts, which, whatever they might have been when spoken, never seemed
quite clear on paper? Or would it not be better to leave the whole thing
and go back to his Northern home? He might find plenty of adventure
there, and breathe in fresh youth and vitality in the cold bright life
of the Norwegian fisheries or of some outlying Swedish farm. And yet he
could not make up his mind to move, or to acknowledge that he had
laboured in vain. It was in vain, though, he said, as he looked out at
the flowing river. Had he gained a single advantage either for his
thoughts or his deeds by all his study of philosophy? In his weariness
he said to himself that he had not; that he had been far better able to
deal with questions of life, so long as he had only handled the exact
sciences, than he was now, through all this uncertain saturation of
foggy visions a