ound had been satisfied to the point of
nausea. All he desired was tranquillity and repose. He was free of
domestic obligations and close family ties. He proposed to remain
so--philosophy his mistress, science his hand-maid, literature his
pastime, books (remembering the bitter sorrows of the tumbril and
scaffold in Paris) in future, his closest friends.

But, unfortunately, though the great church in all its calm grave,
beauty still held the heart the fair landscape, the monastery, which
might have sheltered his renunciation, had been put to secular uses or
fallen into ruin long years ago. If he proposed to retire from the
world, he must himself provide suitable environment. Marychurch Abbey,
at the end of the eighteenth century, had very certainly nothing to
offer him under that head.

And then, with a swiftness of conception and decision possible only to
mercurial-minded persons, his thought darted back to Tandy's, that
unkempt, morally malodorous back-of-beyond and No Man's Land. Its vacant
whitewashed countenance and long-eared chimney-stacks had welcomed him,
if roughly and grudgingly, to England and to peace. Was he not in some
sort thereby in debt to Tandy's bound by gratitude to the place? Should
he not buy it--his private fortune being considerable--and there plant
his hermitage? Should he not renovate and transform it, redeeming it from
questionable uses, by transporting thither, not himself only but his fine
library, his famous herbarium, his cabinets of crystals, of coins, and of
shells? The idea captivated him. He was weary of destruction, having seen
it in full operation and practised on the gigantic scale. Henceforth he
would devote all the energy he possessed to construction--on however
modest and private a one--to a building up, as personal protest against
much lately witnessed wanton and chaotic pulling-down.

In prosecution of which purpose, hopeful once more and elate, bobbing
merrily cork-like upon the surface of surrounding circumstance--although
lamentably deficient, for the moment, in raiment befitting his position
and his purse--Mr. Verity spent two days at the Stag's Head, in
Marychurch High Street. He made enquiries of all and sundry regarding
the coveted property; and learned, after much busy investigation that
the village, and indeed the whole Hundred of Deadham, formed an outlying
and somewhat neglected portion of his acquaintance, Lord Bulparc's
Hampshire estate.

Here was solid infor