of the late Lord Usk, and always
welcome there. His parents died in his infancy: even a long minority
failed to make him a rich man. He has, however, as he had said, enough
for his not extravagant desires, and is able to keep his old estate of
St. Hubert's Lea, in Warwickshire, unembarrassed. His chief pleasure has
been travelling and sailing, and he has travelled and sailed wherever a
horse or a dromedary, a schooner or a canoe, can penetrate. He has told
some of his travels in books so admirably written that, _mirabile
dictu_! they please both learned people and lazy people. They have
earned him a reputation beyond the drawing-rooms and clubs of his own
fashionable acquaintances. He has even considerable learning himself,
although he carries it so lightly that few people suspect it. He has had
a great many passions in his life, but they have none of them made any
very profound impression on him. When any one of them has grown tiresome
or seemed likely to enchain him more than he thought desirable, he has
always gone to Central Asia or the South Pole. The butterflies which he
has broken on his wheel have, however, been of that order which is not
crushed by abandonment, but mends itself easily and soars to new
spheres. He is incapable of harshness to either man or woman, and his
character has a warmth, a gayety, and a sincerity in it which endear him
inexpressibly to all his friends. His friendships have hitherto been
deeper and more enduring than his amours. He is, on the whole,
happy,--as happy as any thinking being can be in this world of anomalies
and purposeless pains.

"But then you always digest all you eat," Usk remarks to him, enviously.

"Put it the other way and be nearer the point," says Brandolin. "I
always eat what I can digest, and I always leave off with an appetite."

"I should be content if I could begin with one," says Usk.

Brandolin is indeed singularly abstemious in the pleasures of the table,
to which the good condition of his nerves and constitution may no doubt
be attributed. "I have found that eating is an almost entirely
unnecessary indulgence," he says in one of his books. "If an Arab can
ride, fight, kill lions, and slay Frenchmen on a mere handful of pulse
or of rice, why cannot we live on it too?" Whereat Usk wrote once on the
margin of the volume, in pencil, "Why should we?"

The author, seeing this one day, wrote also on the margin, "For the best
of all reasons: to do away with dysp