rising in spirited union with the curtain of that
secret: there was matter for song and concert, triumph and gratulation
in it. And during the whole passage of the bridge, he had not once
cast thought on a secret so palpitating, the cause of the morning's
expedition and a long year's prospect of the present day! It seemed to
have been knocked clean out of it--punctilioed out, Fenellan might say.
Nor had any combinations upon the theme of business displaced it. Just
before the fall, the whole drama of the unfolding of that secret was
brilliant to his eyes as a scene on a stage.

He refused to feel any sensible bruise on his head, with the admission
that he perhaps might think he felt one which was virtually no more than
the feeling of a thought;--what his friend Dr. Peter Yatt would define
as feeling a rotifer astir in the curative compartment of a homoeopathic
globule: and a playful fancy may do that or anything. Only, Sanity does
not allow the infinitely little to disturb us.

Mr. Radnor had a quaint experience of the effects of the infinitely
little while threading his way to a haberdasher's shop for new white
waistcoats. Under the shadow of the representative statue of City
Corporations and London's majesty, the figure of Royalty, worshipful in
its marbled redundancy, fronting the bridge, on the slope where the seas
of fish and fruit below throw up a thin line of their drift, he
stood contemplating the not unamiable, reposefully-jolly, Guelphic
countenance, from the loose jowl to the bent knee, as if it were a
novelty to him; unwilling to trust himself to the roadway he had often
traversed, equally careful that his hesitation should not be seen. A
trifle more impressible, he might have imagined the smoky figure and
magnum of pursiness barring the City against him. He could have laughed
aloud at the hypocrisy behind his quiet look of provincial wonderment
at London's sculptor's art; and he was partly tickled as well by the
singular fit of timidity enchaining him. Cart, omnibus, cab, van,
barrow, donkey-tray, went by in strings, broken here and there, and he
could not induce his legs to take advantage of the gaps; he listened
to a warning that he would be down again if he tried it, among those
wheels; and his nerves clutched him, like a troop of household women, to
keep him from the hazard of an exposure to the horrid crunch, pitiless
as tiger's teeth; and we may say truly, that once down, or once out of
the rutted li