defiance of the unknown future. And Ellinor, cultivated and fanciful,
could sympathize with both. And her father, scholar and gentleman,
could sympathize too. But now--"




CHAPTER VII.


"It is no use in the world," said my father, "to know all the languages
expounded in grammars and splintered up into lexicons, if we don't learn
the language of the world. It is a talk apart, Kitty," cried my father,
warming up. "It is an Anaglyph,--a spoken anaglyph, my dear! If all
the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians had been A B C to you, still, if you
did not know the anaglyph, you would know nothing of the true mysteries
of the priests. (1)

"Neither Roland nor I knew one symbol letter of the anaglyph. Talk,
talk, talk on persons we never heard of, things we never cared for. All
we thought of importance, puerile or pedantic trifles; all we thought so
trite and childish, the grand momentous business of life! If you found
a little schoolboy on his half-holiday fishing for minnows with a
crooked pin, and you began to tell him of all the wonders of the deep,
the laws of the tides, and the antediluvian relies of iguanodon and
ichthyosaurus; nay, if you spoke but of pearl fisheries and coral-banks,
or water-kelpies and naiads,--would not the little boy cry out
peevishly, 'Don't tease me with all that nonsense; let me fish in peace
for my minnows!' I think the little boy is right after his own way: it
was to fish for minnows that he came out, poor child, not to hear about