Leonard's face resumed its serenity in his intercourse with his employer; but he did not recover his boyish ingenuous frankness. The under-currents flowed again pure from the turbid soil and the splintered fragments uptorn from the deep; but they were still too strong and too rapid to allow transparency to the surface. And now he stood in the sublime world of books, still and earnest as a seer who invokes the dead. And thus, face to face with knowledge, hourly he discovered how little he knew. Mr. Prickett lent him such works as he selected and asked to take home with him. He spent whole nights in reading; and no longer desultorily. He read no more poetry, no more Lives of Poets. He read what poets must read if they desire to be great--_Sapere principium et fons_--strict reasonings on the human mind; the relations between motive and conduct, thought and action; the grave and solemn truths of the past world; antiquities, history, philosophy. He was taken out of himself. He was carried along the ocean of the universe. In that ocean, O seeker, study the law of the tides; and seeing Chance nowhere--Thought presiding over all--Fate, that dread phantom, shall vanish from creation, and Providence alone be visible in heaven and on earth! CHAPTER III. There was to be a considerable book-sale at a country house one day's journey from London. Mr. Prickett meant to have attended it on his own behalf, and that of several gentlemen who had given him commissions for purchase; but, on the morning fixed for his departure, he was seized with a severe return of his old foe, the rheumatism. He requested Leonard to attend instead of himself. Leonard went, and was absent for the three days during which the sale lasted. He returned late in the evening, and went at once to Mr. Prickett's house. The shop was closed; he knocked at the private entrance; a strange person opened the door to him, and in reply to his question if Mr. Prickett was at home, said with a long and funereal face--"Young man, Mr. Prickett senior has gone to his long home, but Mr. Richard Prickett will see you." At this moment a very grave-looking man, with lank hair, looked forth from the side-door communicating between the shop and the passage; and then stepped forward--"Come in, sir; you are my late uncle's assistant, Mr. Fairfield, I suppose?" "Your late uncle! Heavens, sir, do I understand aright--can Mr. Prickett be dead since I left London?" "Died, sir, suddenly last night. It was an affection of the heart; the doctor thinks the rheumatism attacked that organ. He had small time to provide for his departure, and his account books seem in sad disorder: I am his nephew and executor." Leonard had now followed the nephew into the shop. There, still burned the gas lamp. The place seemed more dingy and cavernous than before. Death always makes its presence felt in the house it visits.