Alas! for the roadside fire, the cosy inn, the Compleat Angler, the Chavender or Chub! And yet--and yet! He had done the right thing, though the Lord alone knew how it would end.

He began to pluck courage from his very melancholy, and hope from his reflections upon the transitoriness of life.

He was austerely following Romance as he conceived it, and if that capricious lady had taken one dream from him she might yet reward him with a better.

Tags of poetry came into his head which seemed to favour this philosophy--particularly some lines of Browning on which he used to discourse to his Kirk Literary Society.

Uncommon silly, he considered, these homilies of his must have been, mere twitterings of the unfledged.