k his
Gladstone"? How strange it must seem! Try it yourself some day and
its effect on your servant. Ask him, for example, to "pack your ----"
and see how he'll stare.

Coming nearer and nearer to earth, I wondered if Colonel Boycott ever
uses the word "boycott," and how strange it must have seemed to the
late MacAdam to walk for miles and miles upon his own name, like a
carpet spread out before him.

Then I once more rebounded heavenwards, at the vision of the eager
dreamy lad whose question had set going all this odd clockwork of
association. He wouldn't lose his Shelley for the world! How like
twenty! And how many things that he wouldn't lose for the world will he
have to give up before he is thirty, I reflected sententiously,--give
up at last, maybe, with a stony indifference, as men on a sinking ship
take no thought of the gold and specie in the hold.

And then, all of a sudden, a little way up the ferny grassy hillside, I
caught sight of the end of a book half hidden among the ferns. I
climbed up to it. Of course it was that very green Shelley which the
young stranger wouldn't lose for the world.

CHAPTER XIX

WHY THE STRANGER WOULD NOT LOSE HIS SHELLEY FOR THE WORLD

Picking up the book, I opened it involuntarily at the titlepage, and
then--I resisted a great temptation! I shut it again. A little flowery
plot of girl's handwriting had caught my eye, and a girl's pretty name.
When Love and Beauty meet, it is hard not to play the eavesdropper, and
it was easy to guess that Love and Beauty met upon that page. St.
Anthony had no harder fight with the ladies he was unpolite enough to
call demons, than I in resisting the temptation to take another look at
that pen-and-ink love making. Now, as I look back, I think it was
sheer priggishness to resist so human and yet so reverent an impulse.
There is nothing sacred from reverence, and love's lovers have a right
to regard themselves as the confidants of lovers, whenever they may
chance to surprise either them or their letters.

While I was still hesitating, and wondering how I could get the book
conveyed to its romantic owner, suddenly a figure turned the corner of
the road, and there was Alastor coming back again. I slipped the book,
in distracted search for which he was evidently still engaged, under
the ferns, and, leisurely lighting a pipe, prepared to tease him. He
was presently within hail, and, looking up, caught sight of me.

"Have you fou