return in the stillness of death to the aspect of youth,--the lines
effaced, the wrinkles gone,--so, in seeing Burley now, you saw what he
had been in his spring of promise. But he himself saw only what he had
failed to be,--powers squandered, life wasted. "I once beheld," he said,
"a ship in a storm. It was a cloudy, fitful day, and I could see the
ship with all its masts fighting bard for life and for death. Then came
night, dark as pitch, and I could only guess that the ship fought on.
Towards the dawn the stars grew visible, and once more I saw the ship: it
was a wreck,--it went down just as the stars shone forth."

When he had made that allusion to himself, he sat very still for some
time, then he spread out his wasted hands, and gazed on them, and on his
shrunken limbs. "Good," said he, laughing low; "these hands were too
large and rude for handling the delicate webs of my own mechanism, and
these strong limbs ran away with me. If I had been a sickly, puny
fellow, perhaps my mind would have had fair play. There was too much of
brute body here! Look at this hand now! You can see the light through
it! Good, good!"

Now, that evening, until he had retired to bed, Burley had been unusually
cheerful, and had talked with much of his old eloquence, if with little
of his old humour. Amongst other matters, he had spoken with
considerable interest of some poems and other papers in manuscript which
had been left in the house by a former lodger, and which, the reader may
remember, Mrs. Goodyer had urged him in vain to read, in his last visit
to her cottage. But then he had her husband Jacob to chat with, and the
spirit bottle to finish, and the wild craving for excitement plucked his
thoughts back to his London revels. Now poor Jacob was dead, and it was
not brandy that the sick man drank from the widow's cruse; and London lay
afar amidst its fogs, like a world resolved back into nebula. So, to