"It was a chosen plot of fertile land, Amongst wide waves set like a little nest, As if it had by Nature's cunning hand Been choycely picked out from all the rest, And laid forth for ensample of the best. No daintie flower or herb that grows on ground, No arborete with painted blossomes drest, And smelling sweete, but there it might be found To bud out faire, and throwe her sweet smell all around." Time has stepped upon another year; not much more than stepped, since that year's first month is not yet out; and Burgoyne has stepped upon another continent before we again rejoin him. There are few, if any of us, who, in the course of our lives, have not had occasion to wish that certain spaces in those lives might be represented by the convenient asterisks that cover them in books; but this is unfortunately impossible to Jim, as to the rest of us; and he has fought through each minute and its minuteful of pain (happily no minute can contain two minutefuls) during the seven months that have elapsed since we parted from him. At first those minutes held nothing but pain; he could not tell you which of them it was that first admitted within its little compass any alien ingredient; and he was shocked and remorseful when he discovered that any such existed. But that did not alter the fact. He has not sold his guns; on the contrary, he has bought two new ones, and he has visited his old friends, the Rockies. Since Amelia's funeral--immediately after which he again quitted England--he has seen no member of his dead betrothed's family, nor has he held any intercourse, beyond the exchange of an infrequent letter, with Mrs. Byng or her son. From the thought of both these latter he shrinks, with a distaste equal in degree, though inspired by different causes. From Mrs. Byng, because he knows that she was aware of his weariness of his poor love--that poor love whom, had he but known it, he had so short a time to be weary of; and from Byng, because, despite the ocean of sorrow, of remorse, of death that rolls in its hopelessness between him and her, he cannot even yet think, without a bitter pang, of the woman who had inspired the young man's hysterical tears and sincere, though silly, suicidal impulses. Jim took that pang with him to the Rockies, stinging, even through the overlying load of his other and acknowledged burden of repentant ache and loss, and he has brought it back with him. He packs it into his portmanteau as much as a matter of course as he does his shirts--in fact more so, for he has once inadvertently left his shirts behind, but the pang never.