wrought on the spot to save me. There had been a big brush of
wings, the flash of an opaline robe, and then, with a great cool
stir of the air, the sense of an angel's having swooped down and
caught me to his bosom. He held me only till the danger was over,
and it all took place in a minute. With my manuscript back on my
hands I understood the phenomenon better, and the reflexions I made
on it are what I meant, at the beginning of this anecdote, by my
change of heart. Mr. Pinhorn's note was not only a rebuke
decidedly stern, but an invitation immediately to send him--it was
the case to say so--the genuine article, the revealing and
reverberating sketch to the promise of which, and of which alone, I
owed my squandered privilege. A week or two later I recast my
peccant paper and, giving it a particular application to Mr.
Paraday's new book, obtained for it the hospitality of another
journal, where, I must admit, Mr. Pinhorn was so far vindicated as
that it attracted not the least attention.



CHAPTER III.



I was frankly, at the end of three days, a very prejudiced critic,
so that one morning when, in the garden, my great man had offered
to read me something I quite held my breath as I listened. It was
the written scheme of another book--something put aside long ago,
before his illness, but that he had lately taken out again to
reconsider. He had been turning it round when I came down on him,
and it had grown magnificently under this second hand. Loose