dwelling were his,--and, best of all, the orchard, containing some
five acres planted with the choicest apples, cherries, plums and
pears, and bearing against its long, high southern wall the finest
peaches and nectarines in the county, was his also. He had, in fact,
everything that the heart of a man, especially the heart of a
clergyman, could desire, except a wife,--and that commodity had been
offered to him from many quarters in various delicate and diplomatic
ways,--only to be as delicately and diplomatically rejected.

And truly there seemed no need for any change in his condition. He
had gone on so far in life,--'so far!' he would occasionally remind
himself, with a little smile and sigh,--that a more or less solitary
habit had, by long familiarity, become pleasant. Actual loneliness
he had never experienced, because it was not in his nature to feel
lonely. His well-balanced intellect had the brilliant quality of a
finely-cut diamond, bearing many facets, and reflecting all the hues
of life in light and colour; thus it quite naturally happened that
most things, even ordinary and common things, interested him. He was
a great lover of books, and, to a moderate extent, a collector of
rare editions; he also had a passion for archaeology, wherein he was
sustained by a certain poetic insight of which he was himself
unconscious. The ordinary archaeologist is generally a mere Dry-as-
Dust, who plays with the bones of the past as Shakespeare's Juliet
fancied she might play with her forefathers' joints, and who eschews
all use of the imaginative instinct as though it were some deadly
evil. Whereas, it truly needs a very powerful imaginative lens to
peer down into the recesses of bygone civilisations, and re-people
the ruined haunts of dead men with their shadowy ghosts of learning,
art, enterprise, or ambition.