simple meals. He had a motive in this. He did not desire to be found
out. Mr. Dale replied for himself and for Mrs. Fairfield, to the
epistles addressed to these two. Riccabocca wrote also.

Nothing could be more kind than the replies of both. They came to
Leonard in a very dark period in his life, and they strengthened him in
the noiseless battle with despair.

If there be a good in the world that we do without knowing it, without
conjecturing the effect it may have upon a human soul; it is when we show
kindness to the young in the first barren footpath up the mountain of
life.

Leonard's face resumed its serenity in his intercourse with his employer;
but he did not recover his boyish ingenuous frankness. The under-
currents flowed again pure from the turbid soil and the splintered
fragments uptorn from the deep; but they were still too strong and too
rapid to allow transparency to the surface. And now he stood in the
sublime world of books, still and earnest as a seer who invokes the dead;
and thus, face to face with knowledge, hourly he discovered how little he
knew. Mr. Prickett lent him such works as he selected and asked to take
home with him. He spent whole nights in reading, and no longer
desultorily. He read no more poetry, no more Lives of Poets. He read
what poets must read if they desire to be great--/Sapere principium et
fons/,--strict reasonings on the human mind; the relations between motive
and conduct, thought and action; the grave and solemn truths of the past
world; antiquities, history, philosophy. He was taken out of himself; he
was carried along the ocean of the universe. In that ocean, O seeker,
study the law of the tides; and seeing Chance nowhere, Thought presiding
over all, Fate, that dread phantom, shall vanish from creation, and