Miss Livingstone had, by Lewis’s advice, ordered post-horses to the carriage, and was in that way enabled to accomplish her round of visits. Lewis carried out his intention of driving the iron-greys, who conducted themselves with so much propriety that on the following day he took his pupil with him, and finding the drive pleased and amused the poor boy he repeated it every fine day. Thus a week slipped away, and the time for the General’s return arrived. It was late on the afternoon of the day on which he was expected, and Lewis was wearily assisting poor Walter to spell through a page of dissyllables, when that peculiar gravel-grinding sound became audible which, in a country house, necessarily precedes an arrival. Then there was a great bustle as of excited servants, a Babel-like confusion of tongues, bumps and thumps of heavy luggage, much trampling of feet, ringing of bells and slamming of doors; then the sounds grew fainter, were remitted at intervals, and at last ceased altogether. The house was no longer masterless--General Grant had returned. Walter’s attention, by no means easy to command for five minutes together at the best of times, became so entirely estranged by the commotion above alluded to, that Lewis closed the book in despair and told him to go and play with Faust, who, sitting upright on a rug in front of the fire, was listening with the deepest interest to all that passed in the hall, and was only restrained from barking by a strict sense of propriety operating on a well-disciplined mind. The boy gladly obeyed, and Lewis, resting his aching head on his hand, fell into deep thought--he thought of old times, when, head of his class at a public school, alike leader and idol of the little world in which he moved, his young ambition had shaped out for itself a career in which the bar, the bench, the senate, were to be but stepping-stones to the highest honours to which energy and talent might attain; and he contrasted his present position with the ideal future his boyish fancy had depicted. Then he bethought him of the tyrant who commanded that a living man should be chained to a corpse, and considered how the cold and numbing influence of the dead, gradually paralysing the vital energy of the living, was, as it were, typical of his own fate. He could not but be conscious of unusual powers of mind, for he had tested them in the struggle for honours with the deep and subtile thinkers of Germany, and had come off victorious; and to reflect that these talents, which might have ensured him success in the game of life, were condemned to be wasted in the wearying attempt to call forth the faint germs of reason in the mind of an almost childish idiot! The thought was a bitter one! and yet for months past he had felt resigned to his fate; and the deep interest he took in his pupil’s improvement, together with the time such a quiet life afforded for reflection and self-knowledge, had rendered him