Lady Bauble waits patiently from March to May for the new Waverley novel, indulging perhaps in an occasional flirtation with Granby or a brief and hurried visit to Brambletye House, but turning eagerly from both to the prospect which the unnamed name of the Great Unknown opens before her imagination. Her visions are full of strange and appalling ideas. Some new Meg Merrilies appears to start into terrible existence; some second Balfour lifts up the sword of the Lord and of Gideon; Amy Robsart is regenerate, Front de Bœuf blasphemes again. But the three volumes come out, and present her with a commonplace bully or an everyday coquette--a lady who chatters at an evening party, a lord who figures in the _Morning Post_. “This really is too bad,” says Lady Bauble, yawning; “I must absolutely give up Sir Walter!” Captain Eustace is ordered to Rangoon. Delightful dreams are his--dreams of success and of reputation, of promotion and of pay, of armies discomfited, of stockades stormed, of midnight glimpses of the King of Ava’s harem, of curry prepared in the King of Ava’s kitchen! A few short weeks, and the fairy vision fades with a vengeance: he finds an empty camp, and a crowded hospital; a weary surgeon, and a burning sun; a rifleman in every bramble-bush, and a rheumatism in every bone. Ο that our hopes could last for ever! That we and the objects of our desire could run on, like the fore and hind wheels of a chariot, always close but never united. That we could be contented to let our enjoyments go on like the lamp of the Rosicrucians, burning and dazzling eternally; without advancing towards them the profane step which, by the essence and law of their nature, must destroy and crush them in a moment! It is now about ten years since I left the residence of my respectable uncle and guardian in order to pay a visit of a few weeks to some friends at a neighbouring watering-place. My guardian, Sir Abraham, was in his day something of a character--and by-and-by I may sketch his portrait. For the present I shall only quote, as faithfully as I can, the old gentleman’s parting admonition, for so constantly and unremittingly had he laboured at my education, up to the age of sixteen, that he considered six weeks of absence a long period, and six miles an infinite distance.