She took her leave of him, and walked away. No, she thought; the herb that brings laughter is called heartsease, and for her just now it grew not in Bradstane. CHAPTER XXXII FIRST ALARM One day, very early in May, Michael Langstroth wrote from Bradstane to Roger Camm in Leeds:— ‘A strong sense of duty alone induces me to trouble you with a letter, for there is literally no news to tell you. When was there ever any in Bradstane? And just now we are duller than usual, for nearly every one is away. People (the few who are left here) talk now off and on about the Derby, and speculate whether Crackpot will win. He is not the favourite, as of course you know, but takes a good place. I daresay I hear more of that kind of thing than you do. The British Medical people meet in Leeds this year. Of course it won’t be till August, but I have every intention of going; and putting up with you; and I look forward to it as if it were some wild dissipation. It is, at any rate, too good a chance to be missed of hearing and seeing something, and getting one’s blood stirred up generally. I often wonder I do not turn into a mummy or a block of wood. On reading this you will probably leap to the rash conclusion that your account of two political meetings, and their consequent excitement, has roused my envy and upset my tranquillity, and that in future, you had perhaps better not supply me with such stimulating food! I beg you will not cherish any such delusion. Your account of the meetings was most interesting and amusing; but as you know, I have a great contempt for all political parties in the abstract, and to see a vast body of men, swayed like reeds by the passion of the moment—groaning like demons when they hear one set of names, cheering like maniacs at another, falling like living storm waves upon any unfortunate wight who dares to express dissent from their views, and hustling him out—is to me a melancholy spectacle. You would doubtless say, that without such passions and prejudices to be worked upon, things might be at a standstill. I suppose they might: all I know is, I am very thankful that there are so many men in the world that my indifference makes no difference. You will wonder whence this sermon arises. I have been meditating a good deal lately o’ nights; having felt tired when I came in, and not having had your music to govern my meditations, as in days of old. And I was thinking, only last night, of a dispute we used to have in our younger days, about life and events. I always maintained (quite wrongly, I confess now) that you got no real _life_, no movement, stimulus, animation, outside of a big city: you vowed that, on the contrary, it is the nature of the man that determines his life, and that dramas and tragedies as full of terror and pathos as Shakespeare’s own might be played out within even as narrow a compass as the township of Bradstane-on-Tees, provided the actors