“How do you mean? what has he done?” “You know my father is excessively vain of his landscape-gardening, and the prodigious improvements which he has made in this same demesne around us. Well, compassionating some one whom Kitely was mangling, ‘more suo’ in an argument, he took that gentleman out for a walk, and, with a conscious pride in his own achievements, led him towards the Swiss cottage beside the waterfall. “Kitely was pleased with every thing; the timber is really well grown, and he praised it; the view is fine, and he said so. Even of the _chalet_ he condescended a few words of approval, as a feature in the scene. The waterfall, however, he would not praise; it might foam, and splash, and whirl as it would; in vain it threw its tiny spray aloft, and hissed beneath the rocks below; he never wasted even a word upon it. “You’d scarce fancy, Mr. Kitely,” said my father, whose patience was sorely tried; “you’d scarce fancy that river you see there was only a mill-stream.” “I’d scarcely think of calling that mill-stream a river, my lord,” was the reply. “Hence the borough of Collyton is still open, and I have come, by his grace’s request, to say that if you desire to enter Parliament it is very much at your service.” This was my introduction to the House. My parliamentary life was, as I have said, a brief one, but not without its triumphs. I was long enough a member to have excited the ardent hopes of my friends, and make my name a thing quoted in the lists of party. Had I remained, I was to have spoken second to the address on the opening of the new session. There was, I own, a most intoxicating sense of pleasure in the first success. The moment in which, fatigued and almost overpowered, I sank into a chair at Bellamy’s, with some twenty around me, congratulating, praising, flattering, and foretelling, was worth living for; and yet, perhaps, in that same instant of triumph were sown the seeds of my malady. I was greatly heated; I had excited myself beyond my strength, and spoken for two hours--to myself it seemed scarce twenty minutes; and then, with open cravat and vest, I sat in the current of air between a door and window, drinking in delicious draughts of iced water and flattery. I went home with a slight cough, and something strange, like an obstruction to full breathing, in my chest. Brodie, who saw me next day, I suppose, guessed the whole mischief; for these men look far a-head, and, like sailors, they see storm and hurricane in the cloud not bigger than a man’s hand. I often regret--I shall continue to do, perhaps, still oftener--that I did not die in the harness. To quit the field for sake of life, and not secure it after all, was paltry policy. But what could I do? a severe and contested election would have killed me, and for Collyton it was impossible I could continue to sit.