torturer-pedant Laud, or the facing bothways Protestant-Manichee
Taylor?'

It was lucky for the life of young Love that the discussion went no
further: Argemone was becoming scandalised beyond all measure.
But, happily, the colonel interposed,--

'Look here; tell me if you know for whom this sketch is meant?'

'Tregarva, the keeper: who can doubt?' answered they both at once.

'Has not Mellot succeeded perfectly?'

'Yes,' said Lancelot. 'But what wonder, with such a noble subject!
What a grand benevolence is enthroned on that lofty forehead!'

'Oh, you would say so, indeed,' interposed Honoria, 'if you knew
him! The stories that I could tell you about him! How he would go
into cottages, read to sick people by the hour, dress the children,
cook the food for them, as tenderly as any woman! I found out, last
winter, if you will believe it, that he lived on bread and water, to
give out of his own wages--which are barely twelve shillings a week-
-five shillings a week for more than two months to a poor labouring
man, to prevent his going to the workhouse, and being parted from
his wife and children.'

'Noble, indeed!' said Lancelot. 'I do not wonder now at the effect
his conversation just now had on me.'

'Has he been talking to you?' said Honoria eagerly. 'He seldom
speaks to any one.'

'He has to me; and so well, that were I sure that the poor were as
ill off as he says, and that I had the power of altering the system
a hair, I could find it in my heart to excuse all political
grievance-mongers, and turn one myself.'

Claude Mellot clapped his white woman-like hands.

'Bravo! bravo! O wonderful conversion! Lancelot has at last
discovered that, besides the "glorious Past," there is a Present
worthy of his sublime notice! We may now hope, in time, that he
will discover the existence of a Future!'

'But, Mr. Mellot,' said Honoria, 'why have you been so unfaithful to
your original? why have you, like all artists, been trying to soften
and refine on your model?'

'Because, my dear lady, we are bound to see everything in its ideal-
-not as it is, but as it ought to be, and will be, when the vices of
this pitiful civilised world are exploded, and sanitary reform, and
a variety of occupation, and harmonious education, let each man
fulfil in body and soul the ideal which God embodied in him.'

'Fourierist!' cried Lancelot, laughing. 'But surely you never saw a
face which had