Such was the hearth which warmed the viper that nestled and gnawed at the heart of Randal, poisoned all the aspirations that youth should have rendered pure, ambition lofty, and knowledge beneficent and divine.
CHAPTER VI.
When the rest of the household were in deep sleep, Randal stood long at his open window, looking over the dreary, comfortless scene—the moon gleaming from skies half-autumnal, half-wintry, upon squalid decay, through the ragged fissures of the firs; and when he lay down to rest, his sleep was feverish, and troubled by turbulent dreams.
However, he was up early, and with an unwonted color in his cheeks, which his sister ascribed to the country air. After breakfast, he took his way toward Hazeldean, mounted upon a tolerable horse, which he hired of a neighboring farmer who occasionally hunted. Before noon, the garden and terrace of the Casino came in sight. He reined in his horse, and by the little fountain at which Leonard had been wont to eat his radishes and con his book, he saw Riccabocca seated under the shade of the red umbrella. And by the Italian's side stood a form that a Greek of old might have deemed the Naiad of the Fount; for in its youthful beauty there was something so full of poetry—something at once so sweet and so stately—that it spoke to the imagination while it charmed the sense.
Randal dismounted, tied his horse to the gate, and, walking down a trellised alley, came suddenly to the spot. His dark shadow fell over the clear mirror of the fountain just as Riccabocca had said, "All here is so secure from evil!—the waves of the fountain are never troubled like those of the river!" and Violante had answered in her soft native tongue, and lifting her dark, spiritual eyes—"But the fountain would be but a lifeless pool, oh, my father, if the spray did not mount toward the skies!"
(TO BE CONTINUED.)
YOU'RE ANOTHER!
"You're another!" It's a vulgar retort, but a common one—though not much in use among well-bred people. But there are many ways of saying it—various modes of conveying the same meaning. "Et tu Brute," observed some one, on reading a debate in the House of Commons; "I often see these words quoted; what can they mean?" "I should say," was the answer, "they mean, 'Oh, you brute!'" "Well, I rather think they mean 'You're another!'" Let the classicist determine which interpretation is the right one.