Giving the necessary orders for his dressing apparatus to be brought up to the mansion before dinner, Burrel sallied forth as soon as he was dressed, and took his way towards the park gate. He paused upon the bridge, however, and for a moment gazed up the long open space of park lawn, broken by old elms and oaks, with the stream flowing calmly on in the midst, and the swans dipping quietly into its waters, and the whole, in the soft morning sunshine, bearing an air of peace, with which even the gray building at the end of the vista harmonized full well. With what other thoughts there might be in Burrel's bosom--and there were a good many different threads that ran across the web in various directions--we will have nothing to do here, but will follow the one continuous line which we began to trace before, and only consider the psychological phenomena that were passing in his heart, as far as they related to Blanche Delaware. That Burrel had thought of her a great deal since last he saw her, there can be no doubt; and he had thought of his own situation too, and what he was about, with a degree of human perversity that was quite extraordinary in a hero of romance. As the beginnings of love must always be imaginative, and as Burrel had got into a bad habit of laughing at most things under the sun, by feeling that few were worth considering seriously--from the effects of which bad habit, be it remarked, he himself, his own mind and peculiarities, were not at all exempt--as a consequence of all this, he had chosen, in the present case, to image the predicament in which he stood to his own fancy, under a thousand different forms, most of them, indeed, ludicrous or trivial. He had been now the moth fluttering round the light--now the trout rising to the hook--but, more frequently still, he had painted himself to himself, as the fly upon the edge of a plate of honey, tasting and retasting the tenacious sweets till his feet become glued to the place, and he is forced to remain and die amidst the plundered stores of the bee. There are several great uses in thus learning to laugh at ourselves. In the first place, we know all that the world--the good-natured world--may, can, might, could, would, should, or ought to say of us. In the next, we can flatter ourselves that we have looked at the most disagreeable, that is to say, the sneering side of things; and lastly--the story of galloping across the swamp, comes over again, and we get over a great deal of ground easily, which it would not do to stay and examine seriously.