it gets so obtuse that nothing can break it.

And now let the mists settle down over the trail of our story, hiding
it utterly on its onward course, for a long way to come, until, after
many years, they may disperse and discover something which, were it
worth while to follow it through all that obscurity, would prove to be
the very same track which that boy was treading when we last saw him,--
though it may have lain over land and sea since then; but the footsteps
that trod there are treading here.




CHAPTER XI.


There is--or there was, now many years ago, and a few years also it was
still extant--a chamber, which when I think of, it seems to me like
entering a deep recess of my own consciousness, a deep cave of my
nature; so much have I thought of it and its inmate, through a
considerable period of my life. After I had seen it long in fancy, then
I saw it in reality, with my waking eyes; and questioned with myself
whether I was really awake.

Not that it was a picturesque or stately chamber; not in the least. It
was dim, dim as a melancholy mood; so dim, to come to particulars,
that, till you were accustomed to that twilight medium, the print of a
book looked all blurred; a pin was an indistinguishable object; the
face of your familiar friend, or your dearest beloved one, would be
unrecognizable across it, and the figures, so warm and radiant with