st be out in her ride with the colonel."

Margrave never again attended the patrician festivities of the Hill.
Invitations were poured upon him, especially by Miss Brabazon and the
other old maids, but in vain.

"Those people," said he, "are too tamed and civilized for me; and so
few young persons among them. Even that girl Jane is only young on the
surface; inside, as old as the World or her mother. I like youth, real
youth,--I am young, I am young!"

And, indeed, I observed he would attach himself to some young person,
often to some child, as if with cordial and special favour, yet for
not more than an hour or so, never distinguishing them by the same
preference when he next met them. I made that remark to him, in rebuke
of his fickleness, one evening when he had found me at work on my
Ambitious Book, reducing to rule and measure the Laws of Nature.

"It is not fickleness," said he,--"it is necessity."

"Necessity! Explain yourself."

"I seek to find what I have not found," said he; "it is my necessity
to seek it, and among the young; and disappointed in one, I turn to the
other. Necessity again. But find it at last I must."

"I suppose you mean what the young usually seek in the young; and if,
as you said the other day, you have left love behind you, you now wander
back to re-find it."

"Tush! If I may judge by the talk of young fools, love may be found
every day by him who looks out for it. What I seek is among the rarest
of all discoveries. You might aid me to find it, and in so doing aid
yourself to a knowledge far beyond all that your formal experiments can
bestow."

"Prove your words, and command my services," said I, smiling somewhat
disdainfully.

"You told me that you had examined into the alleged phenomena of animal
magnetism, and proved some persons who pretend to the gift which the
Scotch call second sight to be bungling impostors. You were right. I
have seen the clairvoyants who drive their trade in this town; a common
gipsy could beat them in their own calling. But your experience must
have shown you that there are certain temperaments in which the gift
of the Pythoness is stored, unknown to the possessor, undetected by the
common observer; but the signs of which should be as apparent to the
modern physiologist, as they were to the ancient priest."

"I at least, as a physiologist, am ignorant of the signs: what are
they?"

"I should despair of making you comprehend them by mere verbal
des