I did not see Margrave the following day, but the next morning, a little after sunrise, he walked into my study, according to his ordinary habit. "So you know something about Sir Philip Derval?" said I. "What sort of a man is he?" "Hateful!" cried Margrave; and then checking himself, burst out into his merry laugh. "Just like my exaggerations! I am not acquainted with anything to his prejudice. I came across his track once or twice in the East. Travellers are always apt to be jealous of each other." "You are a strange compound of cynicism and credulity; but I should have fancied that you and Sir Philip would have been congenial spirits, when I found, among his favourite books, Van Helmont and Paracelsus. Perhaps you, too, study Swedenborg, or, worse still, Ptolemy and Lilly?" "Astrologers? No! They deal with the future! I live for the day; only I wish the day never had a morrow!" "Have you not, then that vague desire for the something beyond,--that not unhappy, but grand discontent with the limits of the immediate Present, from which man takes his passion for improvement and progress, and from which some sentimental philosophers have deduced an argument in favour of his destined immortality?" "Eh!" said Margrave, with as vacant a stare as that of a peasant whom one has addressed in Hebrew. "What farrago of words is this? I do not comprehend you." "With your natural abilities," I asked with interest, "do you never feel a desire for fame?" "Fame? Certainly not. I cannot even understand it!" "Well, then, would you have no pleasure in the thought that you had rendered a service to humanity?" Margrave looked bewildered; after a moment's pause, he took from the table a piece of bread that chanced to be there, opened the window, and threw the crumbs into the lane. The sparrows gathered round the crumbs. "Now," said Margrave, "the sparrows come to that dull pavement for the bread that recruits their lives in this world; do you believe that one sparrow would be silly enough to fly to a house-top for the sake of some benefit to other sparrows, or to be chirruped about after he was dead? I care for science as the sparrow cares for bread,--it may help me to something good for my own life; and as for fame and humanity, I care for them as the sparrow cares for the general interest and posthumous approbation of sparrows!" "Margrave, there is one thing in you that perplexes me more than all else--human puzzle as you are--in your many eccentricities and self-contradictions." "What is that one thing in me most perplexing?"