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. But that was quite
incidental in the humorous run of his talk, diverting to hear while it
lasted. He had, of course, a right to his ideas.

No longer concerned in contesting them, she drank at the water of this
plain earth-well, and hoped she preferred it to fiery draughts, though it
was flattish, or, say, flavourless. In the other there was excess of
flavour--or, no, spice it had to be called. The young schoolmaster's
world seemed a sunless place, the world of traders bargaining for gain,
without a glimmer of the rich generosity to venture life, give it, dare
all for native land--or for the one beloved. Love pressed its claim on
heroical generosity, and instantly it suffused her, as an earth under
flush of sky. The one beloved! She had not known love; she was in her
five-and-twentieth year, and love was not only unknown to her, it was
shut away from her by the lock of a key that opened on no estimable
worldly advantage in exchange, but opened on a dreary, clouded round,
such as she had used to fancy it must be to the beautiful creamy circus-
horse of the tossing mane and flowing tail and superb step. She was
admired; she was just as much doomed to a round of paces, denied the
glorious fling afield, her nature's food. Hitherto she would have been
shamefaced as a boy in forming the word 'love': now, believing it denied
to her for good and all--for ever and ever--her bosom held and uttered
the word. She saw the word, the nothing but the word that it was, and
she envisaged it, for the purpose of saying adieu to it--good-bye even to
the poor empty word.

This condition was attributable to a gentleman's wild rageing with the
word, into which he had not infused the mystic spirit. He poured hot