’"I am a fraction of life’s compound interest. The sum of the mental impressions of all my thread of tendency (which gathers back, taking up cross threads by the way, to the central origin) is invested in my paltry being, and lieth there, together with mine own interest on the vast accumulation, in tail for my next of kin. What can I do in my tiny span but touch the surface of this huge estate: pluck here and there a flower of its fields, whose roots are in immemorial time? Imagination founders in those fathomless depths. Tenuous, dim-forgotten ghosts rise from them. Who shall say that my dreams, however seeming mad and grotesque, are not faithful reflexes of states and conditions which were once realities; memories of forms long extinct; echoes of times when I flew, or spun, or was gaseous, or vast, or little; when I mingled intimate with shapes which are chimerical to my present understanding——"’ The reader broke off, with an impatient grunt. ’There!’ he said, ’dreams mad and grotesque enough, in good sooth; yet not so mad as thine.’ ’Well,’ said Bernardo, ’well,’ with perfect sweetness and good temper. ’Christ in the world? Fah!’ snarled the philosopher. ’I know him. He sits at Rome under a triple tiara. Quit all this sugared dreaming, boy, and face the future like a man.’ ’Does the sun shine out of yesterday or to-morrow? It is enough for the moment to take thought for itself. The future is not.’ ’Pooh! a mere Jesuitry, justifying the moment’s abomination.’ ’Nay: for we shall have to retraverse our deeds, and carry back their burden to our first account—with most, a toilful journey.’ ’They would do better to stop with your Christ, then; and, judged by the preponderance of evil spirits here, I think most do. No future, say’st? But how about that heir of the compound interest? Is there not one waiting to succeed to him? Where? Why, in the future, as surely and inevitably as this date, which I am going to swallow in a moment, will be blood and tissue in me to-morrow.’ He held the fruit up—with a swift movement Bernardo whipped it out of his hand and ate it himself. ’How for your future now?’ he chuckled, pinking all over. Cicada laughed loudly, and Montano swore. His philosophy was not proof against such practical jokes. But, seeing his fury, the boy put out all his sweetness to propitiate him. He was his father’s friend; he was a man of learning; he had suffered grievous wrong. The dog was coaxed presently into opening again upon the angelic principles. It was by such virulent irony that he thought—so warped was his mental vision—to corrode the candour of this saint, and bend him to his own views and uses—a diseased vanity, even had he not reckoned, as will now appear, without the consideration of another possible factor. And ’So,’ said he upon a later occasion, in the sentence which opens this chapter, ’you do not agree with our poor Lupo’s practicable definition of a perfect government?’