arrested, and he leaned against one of the columns in admiration of the
various galaxies in view. In front blazed the rival stars of the United
Service Club and the Athenaeum; to the left, the quaint and peculiar
device which lighted up Northumberland House; to the right, the anchors,
cannons, and bombs which typified ingeniously the martial attributes of
the Ordnance Office.

At that moment there were three persons connected with this narrative
within a few feet of each other, distinguished from the multitude by the
feelings with which each regarded the scene, and felt the jostle of the
crowd. Percival St. John, in whom the harmless sense of pleasure was yet
vivid and unsatiated, caught from the assemblage only that physical
hilarity which heightened his own spirits. If in a character as yet so
undeveloped, to which the large passions and stern ends of life were as
yet unknown, stirred some deeper and more musing thoughts and
speculations, giving gravity to the habitual smile on his rosy lip, and
steadying the play of his sparkling eyes, he would have been at a loss
himself to explain the dim sentiment and the vague desire.

Screened by another column from the pressure of the mob, with his arms
folded on his breast, a man some few years older in point of time,--many
years older in point of character,--gazed (with thoughts how turbulent,--
with ambition how profound!) upon the dense and dark masses that covered
space and street far as the eye could reach. He, indeed, could not have
said, with Varney, that he was "at home in a crowd." For a crowd did not
fill him with the sense of his own individual being and importance, but
grappled him to its mighty breast with the thousand tissues of a common
destiny. Who shall explain and disentangle those high and restless and
interwoven emotions with which intellectual ambition, honourable and
ardent, gazes upon that solemn thing with which, in which, for which it