earth--a truly awful thought! Yet her name would no longer bear the
speaking of it to himself. It conjured up a smoky moon under confounding
eclipse.

Who was Schinderhannes?

Mr. Adister had said, her Schinderhannes.

Patrick merely wished to be informed who the man was, and whether he had
a title, and was much of a knave: and particularly Patrick would have
liked to be informed of the fellow's religion. But asking was not easy.

It was not possible. And there was a barrel of powder to lay a fiery
head on, for a pillow!

To confess that he had not the courage to inquire was as good as an
acknowledgment that he knew too much for an innocent questioner. And
what did he know? His brother Philip's fair angel forbade him to open
the door upon what he knew. He took a peep through fancy's keyhole, and
delighted himself to think that he had seen nothing.

After a turbulent night with Schinderhannes, who let him go no earlier
than the opening of a December day, Patrick hied away to one of the
dusky nooks by the lake for a bracing plunge. He attributed to his
desire for it the strange deadness of the atmosphere, and his incapacity
to get an idea out of anything he looked on: he had not a sensation of
cold till the stinging element gripped him. It is the finest school for
the cure of dreamers; two minutes of stout watery battle, with the enemy
close all round, laughing, but not the less inveterate, convinced him
that, in winter at least, we have only to jump out of our clothes to
feel the reality of things in a trice. The dip was sharpening; he could
say that his prescription was good for him; his craving to get an idea
ceased with it absolutely, and he stood in far better trim to meet his
redoubtable adversary of overnight; but the rascal was a bandit and had
robbed him of his purse; that was a positive fact; his vision had gone;
he felt himself poor and empty and rejoicing in the keenness of his
hunger for breakfast, singularly lean. A youth despoiled of his Vision
and made sensible by the activity of his physical state that he is a
common machine, is eager for meat, for excess of whatsoever you may
offer him; he is on the highroad of recklessness, and had it been
the bottle instead of Caroline's coffee-cup, Patrick would soon have
received a priming for a delivery of views upon the sex, and upon love,
and the fools known as lovers, acrid enough to win the applause of
cynics.

Boasting was the best relief that a young