and gone a little way when a pet bird was found to have been left
behind, and must even now--so it presented itself to him--have already
all the appealing fierceness and wild self-pity at heart of one left by
others to perish of hunger in a closed house; and he returned to fetch
it, himself in hardly less stormy distress. But as he passed in search
of it from room to room, lying so pale, with a look of meekness in
their denudation, and at last through that little, stripped white room,
the aspect of the place touched him like the face of one dead; and a
clinging back towards it came over him, so intense that he knew it
would last long, and spoiling all his pleasure in the realisation of a
thing so eagerly anticipated. And so, with the bird found, but himself
in an agony of home-sickness, thus capriciously sprung up within him,
he was driven quickly away, far into the rural distance, so fondly
speculated on, of that favourite country-road.

NOTES

172. *Published in Macmillan's Magazine, Aug. 1878.

EMERALD UTHWART*

[197] WE smile at epitaphs--at those recent enough to be read easily;
smile, for the most part, at what for the most part is an unreal and
often vulgar branch of literature; yet a wide one, with its flowers
here or there, such as make us regret now and again not to have
gathered more carefully in our wanderings a fair average of the like.
Their very simplicity, of course, may set one's thoughts in motion to
fill up the scanty tale, and those of the young at least are almost
always worth while. At Siena, for instance, in the great Dominican
church, even with the impassioned work of Sodoma at hand, you may
linger in a certain dimly lit chapel to spell out the black-letter
memorials of the German students who died here--aetatis flore!--at the
University, famous early in the last century; young nobles chiefly, far
from the Rhine, from Nuremberg, or Leipsic. Note one in particular!
Loving parents and elder brother meant to record [198] carefully the
very days of the lad's poor life--annos, menses, dies; sent the order,
doubtless, from the distant old castle in the Fatherland, but not quite
explicitly; the spaces for the numbers remain still unfilled; and they
never came to see. After two centuries the omission is not to be
rectified; and the young man's memorial has perhaps its propriety as it
stands, with those unnumbered, or numberless, days. "Full of
affections," observed, once upon a time, a gr