The nephew condescended to a smile of some amused toleration. “My marriage, when it occurs,” said he, “will mark a simple period in the evolution of my character. That, it may be easily understood, might require a foil to its processes of development, as a hen swallows gravel to assist her digestion. You need feel no surprise, sir, if in the end I marry a properly wicked woman.” “Egad! ’tis my devout hope you will, and that she’ll brain you with that demned Encyclopedia that you get all your gallimaufry about equality from. Call back Jepps, and I’ll dictate the letters.” CHAPTER II. On a supremely hot noon of August, Mr Edward Murk, walking leisurely along a road pounded and compounded of small coal, came down towards the ancient city of Liége, and paused at a vantage-point to take in the prospect. This was a fair enough one to any vision, and fair in the extreme to eyes so long drilled to the interminable perspectives of Flanders--to loveless dykes, to canals like sleek ingots of glass, to stretched ribbons of highways tapering to a flat horizon--as that a tumulus would seem as sweet a thing for them to rest on as a woman’s bosom. Now his sight, reining up against hills, gave him a certain emotion of surprise, such as he might have felt if a familiar hunter had unexpectedly shied at a hedgerow. He stood a little above the town, looking over and beyond it. In the middle-distance of his picture--pulled into the soft arms of hills that, melting to their own embrace, became mere swimming banks of mist--floated a prismatic blot of water--the vista of the Meuse--dinted like an opal with shadowy reflections, and lit with sudden sparks in dreamy places. Thence, nearer, a greystone bridge--its arches glazed, he could have thought, with mother-of-pearl windows, like a Chinese model in ivory--bestrode the river channel, seeming to dam back, against his foreground, an accumulated litter of wall and roof and gable, that choked the town reaches, and, breaking away piecemeal, stranded its jetsam all down the valley. Here and there fair steeples stood up from the litter; here and there, in his close neighbourhood, gaunt chimney-stocks exhaled a languid smoke, like tree trunks blasted in a forest fire. Some distance to his left a pretty lofty eminence, that broke at its summit into a fret of turret and escarpment, stood sentinel over the ages; while below this, and nearer at hand, the great block of an episcopal palace sprouted from a rocky plateau, the velvet slopes of which trailed downwards into the very hands of the city. “The bishop and his train-bearers,” thought Mr Murk. “The town holds up the skirts of the palace. That must all be changed by-and-by. But I confess I should like to record a little of the picturesqueness of life before the roller of equality is dragged over the continents.”