'DEAR NEPHEW,--If your studies have left you brains enough to apprehend the vanity of double firsts and their consequences, come to me and let me look at you. If I like your looks you may stay here a month or two. You will see the country, Diana, and the stars; you will hear the winds, the birds, and the brook; and of the world you have hitherto lived in you will see and hear nothing. I shall expect you the day after to-morrow.--Your uncle, 'PHILIP NORMAN.' I allowed myself no doubts as to this invitation, but wrote an acceptance by return of post. The rest of the day was spent in packing my trunk and making arrangements for my absence. It was only on the evening preceding departure, when all preparations were complete, that I found time to sit down and recall what little I knew of my uncle Philip, and to forecast the kind of life I might expect with him. He was my mother's brother, and I remember hearing that he had quarrelled with her on the occasion of her marriage some twenty-five years ago. Later on, he had himself married, but his wife had died in childbirth within the year, leaving him with an infant daughter--presumably the Diana referred to in his letter. But 'Diana--and the stars'--what was the meaning of that? Was my worthy relative a dabbler in astrology--a devotee of forbidden sciences? The idea moved me strangely. I had always been an imaginative youth, and nothing had stimulated the boyish poetry of my nature so much as the beauty and mystery of the heavenly bodies. I loved to speculate as to whether they were inhabited, and, if so, by what sort of beings: I loved to believe that they exercised some inscrutable influence over human destinies; that, at all events, the fortunes of our earth were connected with them in some manner whereof the attraction of gravitation was but the material symbol. Such speculations used to inspire me with a feeling at once of insignificance and of exaltation; and I deemed that my life could not be spent more wisely and worthily than in pondering over these secrets of the stars, and striving to solve the problem of their affinity with man. As I grew up, however, the course of my education drew me away from the region of these fancies; not without a vague sentiment of disappointment, I learned to open the gates of practical knowledge with the key of inductive reasoning; and the mystic enchantment of those heavenly suns and planets was half destroyed by the rude facts of spectrum analysis, and the ingenious calculations of distances, orbits, and dimensions. Astronomy, with its certainties and its syllogisms, repelled me: it revealed too much, and yet nothing to my purpose. I hated the impertinence of him who would tell me the density of Jupiter, the composition of Sirius, and the names of the mountains in the moon. To my sense, such petty knowledge was worse than no knowledge at all,