he crumbs into the lane. The sparrows gathered round the crumbs.

"Now," said Margrave, "the sparrows come to that dull pavement for the
bread that recruits their lives in this world; do you believe that one
sparrow would be silly enough to fly to a house-top for the sake of some
benefit to other sparrows, or to be chirruped about after he was dead?
I care for science as the sparrow cares for bread,--it may help me to
something good for my own life; and as for fame and humanity, I care
for them as the sparrow cares for the general interest and posthumous
approbation of sparrows!"

"Margrave, there is one thing in you that perplexes me more than
all else--human puzzle as you are--in your many eccentricities and
self-contradictions."

"What is that one thing in me most perplexing?"

"This: that in your enjoyment of Nature you have all the freshness of a
child, but when you speak of Man and his objects in the world, you talk
in the vein of some worn-out and hoary cynic. At such times, were I
to close my eyes, I should say to myself, 'What weary old man is thus
venting his spleen against the ambition which has failed, and the love
which has forsaken him?' Outwardly the very personation of youth, and
revelling like a butterfly in the warmth of the sun and the tints of the
herbage, why have you none of the golden passions of the young,--their
bright dreams of some impossible love, their sublime enthusiasm for
some unattainable glory? The sentiment you have just clothed in the
illustration by which you place yourself on a level with the sparrows is
too mean and too gloomy to be genuine at your age. Misanthropy is among
the dismal fallacies of gray beards. No man, till man's energies leave
him, can divorce himself from the bonds of our social kind."

"Our kind! Your kind, possibly; but I--" He swept his hand over his
brow, and resumed, in strange, absent, and wistful accents: "I wonder
what it is that is wanting here, and of which at moments I have a
dim reminiscence." Again he paused, and gazing on me, said with more
appearance of friendly interest than I had ever before remarked in his
countenance, "You are not looking well. Despite your great physical
strength, you suffer like your own sickly patients."

"True! I suffer at this moment, but not from bodily pain."

"You have some cause of mental disquietude?"

"Who in this world has not?"

"I never have."

"Because you own you have never loved. Certainly, you never