.

THE SECRETARY TAKEN AS AN ANTIDOTE.
Dusty wayfarers along a white high-road who know of a bubbling little spring across a stile, on the woodland borders of deep grass, are hailed to sit aside it awhile: and Aminta's feverishness was cooled by now and then a quiet conversation with the secretary ambitious to become a school-master.

Lady Charlotte liked him, so did her lord; Mrs.Lawrence had chatted with him freshly, as it was refreshing to recollect; nobody thought him a stunted growth.
In Aminta's realized recollections, amid the existing troubles of her mind, the charge against him grew paler, and she could no longer quite think that the young hero transformed into a Mr.Cuper had deceived her, though he had done it--much as if she had assisted at the planting and watched aforetime the promise of a noble tree, to find it, after an interval of years, pollarded--a short trunk shooting out a shock of small, slim, stiff branches; dwarfed and disgraced; serviceable perhaps; not ludicrous or ugly, certainly, taking it for a pollard.

And he was a cool well-spring to talk with.

He, supposed once to be a passionate nature, scorned passion as a madness; he smiled in his merciful executioner's way at the high society, of which her aim was to pass for one among the butterflies or dragonflies; he had lost his patriotism; he labelled our English classes the skimmers, the gorgers, the grubbers, and stigmatized them with a friendly air; and uttered words of tolerance only for farmers and surgeons and schoolmasters.