"Now I must bid you good-by. My way lies through those meadows, and
yours no doubt along the high road."

"Not so. Permit me to accompany you. I have a lodging not far from
hence, to which the path through the fields is the shortest way."

The minstrel turned a somewhat surprised and somewhat inquisitive look
towards Kenelm. But feeling, perhaps, that having withheld from his
fellow-traveller all confidence as to his own name and attributes, he
had no right to ask any confidence from that gentleman not voluntarily
made to him, he courteously said "that he wished the way were longer,
since it would be so pleasantly halved," and strode forth at a brisk
pace.

The twilight was now closing into the brightness of a starry summer
night, and the solitude of the fields was unbroken. Both these men,
walking side by side, felt supremely happy. But happiness is like
wine; its effect differing with the differing temperaments on which it
acts. In this case garrulous and somewhat vaunting with the one man,
warm-coloured, sensuous, impressionable to the influences of external
Nature, as an Aeolian harp to the rise or fall of a passing wind; and,
with the other man, taciturn and somewhat modestly expressed,
saturnine, meditative, not indeed dull to the influences of external
Nature, but deeming them of no value, save where they passed out of
the domain of the sensuous into that of the intellectual, and the soul
of man dictated to the soulless Nature its own questions and its own
replies.

The minstrel took the talk on himself, and the talk charmed his
listener. It became so really eloquent in the tones of its utterance,