Still, I would not have you deem me discontented with my lot; far from it. I chose my path early in life, and never saw reason to regret the choice. How many of you can say as much? I felt that while the tender ties of home and family, the charities that grow up around the charmed circle of a wife and children, are the great prizes of life, there are also a thousand lesser ones in the wheel, in the kindly sympathies with which the world abounds; that to him who bears no ill-will at his heart- -nay, rather loving all things that are lovable, with warm attachments to all who have been kind to him, with strong sources of happiness in his own tranquil thoughts--the wandering life would offer many pleasures. Most men live, as it were, with one story of their lives, the traits of childhood maturing into manly features; their history consists of the development of early character in circumstances of good or evil fortune. They fall in love, they marry, they grow old, and they die--each incident of their existence bearing on that before and that after, like link upon link of some great chain. He, however, who throws himself like a plank upon the waters, to be washed hither and thither as wind or tide may drive him, has a very different experience. To him life is a succession of episodes, each perfect in itself; the world is but a number of tableaux, changing with climate and country--his sorrows in France having no connection with his joys in Italy; his delights in Spain living apart from his griefs on the Rhine. The past throws no shadow on the future; his philosophy is to make the most of the present; and he never forgets La Bruyère’s maxim--‘Il faut rire avant d’être heureux, _de peur de mourir sans avoir ri_.’ Now, if you don’t like my philosophy, set it down as a dream, and here I am awake once more. And certainly I claim no great merit on the score of my vigilance; for the tantararara that awoke me would have aroused the Seven Sleepers themselves. Words are weak to convey the most distant conception of the noise; it seemed as though ten thousand peacocks had congregated beneath my window, and with brazen throats were bent on giving me a hideous concert; the fiend-chorus in _Robert le Diable_ was a psalm-tune compared to it. I started up and rushed to the casement; and there, in the lawn beneath, beheld some twenty persons costumed in hunting fashion, their horses foaming and splashed, their coats stained with marks of the forest. But the uproar was soon comprehensible, owing to some half-dozen of the party who performed on that most diabolical of all human inventions, the _cor de chasse_.