o be at work!"

And, leaving his unemptied glass upon the table, he departed and was
never known to sip another drop of wine.

And now, again, he resumed his wanderings in the woods and fields. It
might be fancied that the bright butterfly, which had come so
spirit-like into the window as Owen sat with the rude revellers, was
indeed a spirit commissioned to recall him to the pure, ideal life that
had so etheralized him among men. It might be fancied that he went
forth to seek this spirit in its sunny haunts; for still, as in the
summer time gone by, he was seen to steal gently up wherever a
butterfly had alighted, and lose himself in contemplation of it. When
it took flight his eyes followed the winged vision, as if its airy
track would show the path to heaven. But what could be the purpose of
the unseasonable toil, which was again resumed, as the watchman knew by
the lines of lamplight through the crevices of Owen Warland's shutters?
The towns-people had one comprehensive explanation of all these
singularities. Owen Warland had gone mad! How universally
efficacious--how satisfactory, too, and soothing to the injured
sensibility of narrowness and dulness--is this easy method of
accounting for whatever lies beyond the world's most ordinary scope!
From St. Paul's days down to our poor little Artist of the Beautiful,
the same talisman had been applied to the elucidation of all mysteries
in the words or deeds of men who spoke or acted too wisely or too well.
In Owen Warland's case the judgment of his towns-people may have been
correct. Perhaps he was mad. The lack of sympathy--that contrast
between himself and his neighbors which took away the restraint of
example--was enough to make him so. Or possibly he had caught just so
much of ethereal radiance as served to bewilder him, in an earthly
sense, by its intermixture with the common daylight.

One evening, when the artist had returned from a customary ramble and
had just thrown the lustre of his lamp on the delicate piece of work so
often interrupted, but still taken up again, as if his fate were
embodied in its mechanism, he was surprised by the entrance of old
Peter Hovenden. Owen never met this man without a shrinking of the
heart. Of all the world he was most terrible, by reason of a keen
understanding which saw so distinctly what it did see, and disbelieved
so uncompromisingly in what it could not see. On this occasion the old
watchmaker had merely a gracious word o