with whom can you repose your vexations, if such there be, more safely
than with your old tutor?"

I was taken unawares; and not having yet formed a distinct conception of
my own grievances, promptly denied that I had any.

"It may be so," said my friend; "and yet once or twice this evening I
saw your cheek alternately flush and grow pale, with a suddenness that
alarmed me for your health. In one of your pleasantest stories, while
you were acting the narrative with a liveliness evidently unconscious,
and giving me and mine a treat which we have not had for a long time, I
observed your voice falter, as if some spasm of soul had shot across
you; and I unquestionably saw, that rare sight in the eyes of man, a
tear."

I denied this instance of weakness stoutly; but the old man's
importunities prevailed, and, by degrees, I told him, or rather his
good-natured cross-examination moulded for me, a statement of my
anxieties at home.

The Vicar, with all his simplicity of manner, was a man of powerful and
practical understanding. He had been an eminent scholar at his
university, and was in a fair way for all its distinctions, when he
thought proper to fall desperately in love. This, of course, demolished
his prospects at once. I never heard his subsequent history in detail;
but he had left England, and undergone a long period of disheartening
and distress. Whether he had not, in those times of desolation, taken
service in the Austrian army, and even shared some of its Turkish
campaigns, was a question which I heard once or twice started at the
Castle; and a slight contraction of the arm, and a rather significant