n to pass the morning here?" asks the youth, at length, "or
where shall I find you later on?"

"I 'll do whatever you like best," said the other, in a rich brogue; "I
'm agreeable to go or stay,--_ad utrumque pa-ratus_." And Billy Traynor,
for it was he, shut up his venerable volume.

"I don't wish to disturb you," said the boy, mildly, "you can read. I
cannot; I have a fretful, impatient feeling over me that perhaps will
go off with exercise. I'll set out, then, for a walk, and come back here
towards evening, then go and dine at the Rocca, and afterwards whatever
you please."

"If you say that, then," said Billy, in a voice of evident delight,
"we'll finish the day at the Professor Tadeucci's, and get him to go
over that analysis again."

"I have no taste for chemistry. It always seems to me to end where it
began," said the boy, impatiently. "Where do all researches tend to?
how are you elevated in intellect? how are your thoughts higher, wider,
nobler, by all these mixings and manipulations?"

"Is it nothing to know how thunder and lightning is made; to understand
electricity; to dive into the secrets of that old crater there, and see
the ingredients in the crucible that was bilin' three thousand years
ago?"

"These things appeal more grandly to my imagination when the mystery
of their forces is unrevealed. I like to think of them as dread
manifestations of a mighty will, rather than gaseous combinations or
metallic affinities."

"And what prevents you?" said Billy, eagerly. "Is the grandeur of
the phenomenon impaired because it is in part intelligible? Ain't you
elevated as a reasoning being when you get what I may call a peep into
God's workshop, rather than by implicitly accepting results just as any
old woman accepts a superstition?"

"There is something ignoble in mechanism," said the boy, angrily.

"Don't say that, while your heart is beatin' and your arteries is
contractin; never say it as long as your lungs dilate or collapse.
It's mechanism makes water burst out of the ground, and, swelling into
streams, flow as mighty rivers through the earth. It's mechanism raises
the sap to the topmost bough of the cedar-tree that waves over Lebanon.
'T is the same power moves planets above, just to show us that as there
is nothing without a cause, there is one great and final 'Cause' behind
all."

"And will you tell me," said the boy, sneeringly, "that a sunbeam pours
more gladness into your heart because a p