At this moment the professor entered, | learn anything in my life, though!" he accompanied by Mrs. Holland, who, under added gloomily; "so there would not be his wing, appeared in some degree to any sort of use in my trying." regain self-possession. He was a small, thin, bloodless-looking man, with that extreme lankiness of jaw which one has come to associate with the citizens of the great republic, but with a feebler mouth and chin than generally accompanies the type. His forehead, on the other hand, was remarkably large and fine, and the same contradiction seemed to some degree to run through the whole person and bearing. His eyes, which were evidently weak, were protected by large spectacles, and his head partially covered with a small black skull-cap.

"Ah! my niece, I perceive, is showing you some of our new forms," he said to Borroughdale, when the first greetings had been exchanged. "Your lordship, I presume, takes an interest in marine zoology?" he added in a tone of confidence.

"Not I," said Borroughdale; "at least I never thought at all about it before, but what Miss Holland has just been showing me is the most extraordinary thing I ever saw; things, you know, that are all over glass balls, and bob out at you like a jack-in-the-box. I could go on looking at them all day."

"Ah! the little Carchesium. True, those compound Vorticellacea form a singularly striking group, do they not? Professor Wurst of Munich has recently been publishing the results of a series of investigations upon their structural development which promises to be of considerable value. No doubt, though, Gellenshaft is still the great authority upon the whole order. Your lordship is acquainted probably with the writings of Professor Gellenshaft ? "

"Not I; I know nothing, I tell you, about them, or about science or natural history, or anything of the sort. I almost wish I did; at least, if there are many things as curious as those," he added, glancing ingenuously over to the table.

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Why do you not take to it then?" Miss Holland inquired, who, with the orderliness of habit, was mechanically put ting the things there back into their places again. "You really ought to do so when it interests you so much," she added, turning round to look at him, and speaking with some insistance.

Borroughdale reddened, shuffled his feet about a little on the carpet. "I shouldn't so much mind if you'd help me!" he exclaimed, with a sudden burst of audacity. Then, with an equally rapid lapse into despondency, "I never could

The end of it was, however, that when a quarter of an hour later Lord Borroughdale took his leave, he carried off with him a pocket microscope and a bottle containing a pinch of green stuff. Half that night he sat up trying to puzzle out those unaccountable aberrations which unfolded themselves to his eyes, and two days later he reappeared at the professor's clamor. ing to know where he could get some more. Under these auspices he was not long in making friends with the purveyors of the tanks at the Zoological Gardens, and in duly setting himself up with a microscope and a regulation supply of "ob. jects." It was the genuine outbreak of a hitherto unsuspected faculty, which but for some such accident as this might have lain comfortably perdue under the surface for the rest of his days. Now, however, that it had proclaimed itself, it did not seem likely to be allowed much rest; one thing inevitably leading to another, and that other, as inevitably, to the one immediately beyond.

Borroughdale, whom all his masters with one consent had proclaimed too stupid or too stubborn to learn anything, for whom the magnificent educational resources of England had hitherto been ransacked in vain, having apparently at the eleventh hour discovered something about which he did care to be informed, seemed bent upon making up for lost time. He sat hours at a time over his forceps and pliers, plunged into the most uninviting of primers and manuals, attended lectures, and spent days amongst the bewildering mazes of the British mu seums. Of course all this sudden intellectual activity necessitated, it will be understood, a pretty constant recurrence to the house in Bayswater, and to those sources of encouragement for which he had there stipulated. Poets from the beginning of things have sung the provoca tions and incitements which lead to the romantic passion, but perhaps a community of hobbies- little romantic as that may sound-is not one of the least effective or the least stimulating of these. So at any rate it was in this case. Borroughdale's brain and heart, despite the immeasurable antagonism which is supposed to exist between the two organs, awoke both of them into conscious activity, both of them, as it happened, precisely at the same moment.

Although in his eyes she appeared to

one

which seemed to carry a sort of aristocratic effulgence in its very syllables -sitting hour after hour in his own front parlor, imbibing the first syllables of zoological lore from his own inspired lips, was eminently soothing to his amour propre; not the less that he naturally set down the whole of Lord Borroughdale's sudden enthusiasm to the score of that scientific radiance which emanated so con

To some of that important young man's own friends this sudden transformation of incorrigible idler into ardent and indefatigable learner, was less a source of jubilation, however, than of perplexity, and even of a somewhat irritated mystification. Farquart, who had heard something of the new mania, but who for more than a fortnight past had seen nothing of Borroughdale, walked over to his house in Portman Square one morning towards luncheon time, and was informed by the servant who opened the door that his lordship was up-stairs in the drawing-room.

be a perfect prodigy of learning (which, in | gauge or appreciate the labors of their truth, the poor girl was very far from intellectual betters. To have, therefore, being), he was not at all the more alarmed the owner of so shining a name of Miss Holland upon that account. It was not the cleverness or even the brilliancy of other women, so much as their fine clothes and their irresponsible chatter, which had made them so mortally terrifying in his eyes. Katherine Holland had apparently no fine clothes, and she had, equally apparently, no disposition for irresponsible chattering, or, if she had, the early severity of circumstances had effectually taken it from her. This pre-spicuously from his own person. mature gravity, which would have made her fatally wanting in charm to most young men, was only, as it happened, an additional attraction to this one. Deep down at the bottom of all Borroughdale's sullenness and all his disinclination for soci ety lay two very distinct qualities: an intense morbidly intense sensitiveness to the good opinion of others, and a pride which shrank from being indebted either to his money or his position for suffrages, which it seemed to him hopeless to expect to claim upon more personal grounds. Miss Holland's gravity, her incapacity for small talk, and her absorption whether real or sympathetic in larger interests, was as soothing to him as the low notes of a wood-pigeon to ears long teased by the pertinacious twittering of sparrows. He began by talking to her about his various zoological difficulties; he went on to talk to her about some of those other less impersonal stumbling. blocks of which he had all his life been more or less dumbly conscious; and before the end of their first three weeks of intercourse he had ended by becoming as thoroughly, heartily, and irrecoverably in love with her as the most ardent enthusiast upon the subject could possible desire.

To the other two members of her little circle he was a source in some degree of awe, in some degree of perplexity, but also and chiefly, it must be said, of profound pride and gratification, the professor especially being inspired with something very like a positive enthusiasm for this latest and most ardent, if not most promising, of recruits to the great army of scientific workers. Despite his own pre-eminently respectable standing in that sphere, the good man had all his life been strangely pricked and tormented by vague hankerings after another and a less attainable one, generally disguised from himself by slighting references to the incapacity of men of rank and position to adequately 2498

LIVING AGE.

VOL. XLIX

Wondering rather at this unwonted change of habit he walked up-stairs, and found the owner of the house gazing en thralled into a small glass phial, a pot of canada balsam simmering upon a tripod at his side, a quantity of pots and pans containing "objects "scattered about the floor, and a very perceptible aroma of what, by a delicate periphrase, may be called extinct marine organisms.

Hearing steps, the investigator looked up-his eyes still alight with the fires of discovery and stretched out a hand wet with salt water to his guest.

"What the deuce have you got hold of there?" the other inquired, in a tone of some disgust.

"Amphipoda - such extraordinary lit tle beggars!"

"And what may their names be in the ordinary language of civilization?" "Well, they're a sort of crab at least

no, not crabs exactly, either. You never went in for zoology, Farquart, amongst the multitude of things you know, did you? Why was that, I wonder? You can form no idea what a tremendously interesting thing it is."

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Very likely; but you see I happen to have a particular dislike to handling slimy messes," his friend replied, wiping his hand leisurely upon his pocket handkerchief. "Why, Borroughdale, I had no conception you had such a good ceiling

up here," he added, with a sudden accel- | sense of the unfathomable and immeasureration of interest, glancing as he spoke able stupidity of things stole gently over into the vault above his head, where some the clever young man's mind, and he twice lightly attired but decorously obscure shrugged his shoulders again before arrivdamsels appeared to be disporting them- ing at his destination. selves against a chocolate-colored sky. "That must be a Verrio, I declare," he added.

He had by this time seated himself upon | your uncle's pursuits," he added, " reminds a chair, and was glancing up and down me of Borroughdale. You remember my the room with that sense of amusement friend Borroughdale, whom I introduced which so often assailed him when he to you at my studio? If I am not misfound himself confronted by other peo- taken your uncle has got in him a new ple's notions of the decorative. "One recruit. I was at his house the other makes more way often by resting on one's day, and I found him up to the ears in oars, you know," he added, turning his strange and slimy beasts, the room smell. eyes so as to bring them to bear upon his ing like a seashore at extremely low tide, cousin's face. one hand excitedly twisting up the screws of a microscope, and the other tenderly caressing a dead crab."

"One might rest too long though," she suggested.

Miss Holland smiled.

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Yes, I know. We have seen a good deal of him lately," she said. "He is interested in zoology. He has never studied it at all, it seems, before; but my uncle says that he has never known any one who picked up so much in so short a time."

Farquart laughed, throwing back his head with an intense but perfectly goodhumored entertainment.

Oh, yes. Of course there is always that risk; still I think on the whole it is less than the opposite one; supposing, that is, that a man has the wherewithal to do anything at all in him; and if he hasn't why of course it doesn't much matter what he does, whether he grinds or whether he does not. But if he has he can't really idle even if he tries. Everything one sees; everything bombastic people call one's environment; the people one meets; the houses one goes to; that tiresome "Then all I can say is that you have woman you danced with yesterday, or worked a miracle amongst you!" he extook into dinner the day before; all form claimed. "I have known Borroughdale part, artistically speaking, of your daily ages we are almost like brothers. There bread. You don't consciously chronicle is not a better-natured, an honester, a them, of course, or sketch them, or any-kinder-hearted fellow in all England; in thing of that sort, but they go down somewhere or other, and come out again in one form or other if they're wanted. Forgive my inflicting upon you this elaborate recitation of my artistic creed, but seriously I believe that's about it. The cream of a man's ideas, his best inspirations, all come to him in that sort of unpremeditated way. It gives a better chance, too, to the infinities and immensities which are always floating about if one can only make use of them. Sticking like a leach to his easel or his desk, as the case may be, his ideas get ossified, and ten to one, he is missing a dozen better ideas while he is pegging away like a cart-horse at one."

Katherine Holland shook her head slightly. She thought her cousin's theories very brilliant, very ingenious, but at the same time slightly unpractical.

fact, I'm perfectly devoted to him: at the same time I am bound in honor to declare that during all the years we have been together I have never once, even once, known him acquire anything of his own free will. And at Oxford, old Godby, who was his tutor, and also mine, told me that in all his experience he never came across so stolidly, respectably, but absolutely impervious, a headpiece."

Miss Holland looked a little surprised. The last part of her cousin's speech did not seem to her to fit particularly well with the profession of friendship at the beginning of it.

Haven't you read something of the same sort in the biography of various illustrious savants before now?" she said quickly. "It seems to me I have. Besides, Lord Borroughdale tells me that he "Now, my uncle, would he I wonder really has always taken an interest in get any clearer ideas about his morphol-natural history-watching the ways of ogy or his comparative anatomy if he took to a course of balls and dinner parties?" she inquired somewhat ironically.

animals, I mean, and that sort of thing only that he was always rather ashamed of it than otherwise, as no one else he knew cared for anything of the sort, and it appeared like a sort of remnant of child

Farquart shook his head.

"Your uncle? Oh, well-no, very likely not; but that, you will admit, is different," Farquart answered, with a con-ishness." scientious effort at banishing from his tone all sense of the immensity of the difference. "I was speaking, of course, of the more purely creative processes. By the way, talking of the others of

"I expect that their chief attraction in his eyes- latterly, at any rate has lain in the fact that there was no danger of their insisting upon his turning any of them

THE very slight amount of esteem expressed for his new studies by his friends and relations gave but little concern to Lord Borroughdale. More accurately it "Not for nearly a week," the other | may be said to have concerned him not at