now and then a drunken hiccough or maudlin laugh, as some conquered
votary of Bacchus was fairly carried up to his domicile.

All, then, at last was silent, just as the clock from the church sounded
the stroke of eleven.

Leonard, meanwhile, had been looking over his manuscripts. There was
first a project for an improvement on the steam-engine,--a project that
had long lain in his mind, begun with the first knowledge of mechanics
that he had gleaned from his purchases of the tinker. He put that aside
now,--it required too great an effort of the reasoning faculty to
re-examine.

He glanced less hastily over a collection of essays on various subjects,
--some that he thought indifferent, some that he thought good. He then
lingered over a collection of verses written in his best hand with loving
care,--verses first inspired by his perusal of Nora's melancholy
memorials. These verses were as a diary of his heart and his fancy,--
those deep, unwitnessed struggles which the boyhood of all more
thoughtful natures has passed in its bright yet murky storm of the cloud
and the lightning-flash, though but few boys pause to record the crisis
from which slowly emerges Man. And these first desultory grapplings with
the fugitive airy images that flit through the dim chambers of the brain
had become with each effort more sustained and vigorous, till the
phantoms were spelled, the flying ones arrested, the Immaterial seized,
and clothed with Form. Gazing on his last effort, Leonard felt that
there at length spoke forth the poet. It was a work which though as yet
but half completed, came from a strong hand; not that shadow trembling on
unsteady waters, which is but the pale reflex and imitation of some
bright mind, sphered out of reach and afar, but an original substance,--