CHAPTER LXIV.

'Tis but a single murder.
--Lillo: Fatal Curiosity.

It was in a melancholy and thoughtful mood that I rode away from the
parsonage. Numerous and hearty were the maledictions I bestowed upon a
system of education which, while it was so ineffective with the many, was
so pernicious to the few. Miserable delusion (thought I), that encourages
the ruin of health and the perversion of intellect by studies that are as
unprofitable to the world as they are destructive to the possessor--that
incapacitate him for public, and unfit him for private life--and that,
while they expose him to the ridicule of strangers, render him the victim
of his wife, and the prey of his domestic.

Busied in such reflections, I rode quickly on till I found myself once
more on the heath. I looked anxiously round for the conspicuous equipage
of Lady Chester, but in vain--the ground was thin--nearly all the higher
orders had retired--the common people, grouped together, and clamouring
noisily, were withdrawing: and the shrill voices of the itinerant hawkers
of cards and bills had at length subsided into silence. I rode over the
ground, in the hope of finding some solitary straggler of our party.
Alas! there was not one; and, with much reluctance at, and distaste to,
my lonely retreat, I turned in a homeward direction from the course.

The evening had already set in, but there was a moon in the cold grey
sky, that I could almost have thanked in a sonnet for a light which I