yearly salary which made Fessenden’s head swim, had agreed to occupy this building with a corps of assistants and work upon the idea which a youth had conceived. The author of the idea felt no temptation to take charge himself. The mere fact that more experienced genius could be bought delivered him from the thrall of his ideal, although he still took a scientific and patriotic interest in its accomplishment. Robbed of this dream of immortality, he had dropped the curtain upon his inner life and endeavored to fulfil his immediate destiny. As his powers of concentration were very great, he had succeeded for a time. During the fortnight before sailing, novelty and wonder had sustained him, and for a time at sea the long conversations with his father were agreeably varied by instructions in the science of yachting. But Fessenden was Fessenden--a personality, a young man bursting with precocious energy, ambition, independence. His reassertion was slow but persistent, and during one sleepless night alone on deck the naked truth confronted him that he was at the end of his endurance, that however he might conform to his father’s wishes in the future, for the present he must not only have an interval of personal liberty, but arrange his nebulous ambitions and satisfy them. He restrained his impatience until three o’clock, then awakened Mr. Abbott--who smiled and slept again--and plunged without a guide into Norway. He bathed in streams, he slept under the stars, he saw no one but peasants, he hardly uttered a word for three days; and he was completely happy. When he was not in mountain gorges he was in pine forests; everywhere he had Nature in her magnificence, and he was alone. For two days he refused to think--it was enough to forget, to feel the freedom of the years when he believed himself innocent of fortune, with a glorious and self-made future stretching through infinite horizons. But on the evening of the third day he turned his back on the scenery, sat down on the grass, and thought. That the prospect before him was hateful and hideous he admitted aloud, lest he should seem to blink any modicum of the truth. The abstract fact that he was a rich man instead of a poor one dwindled to comparative insignificance beside the million details which made up the sum of that fact. Had he been the author of those details, his inherited and financial instincts, so quick at college, would no doubt possess him and obliterate the dreams of his youth. But that mountain of particulars, massive and petty, had fallen upon him without a moment’s warning, and he was not its illustrious author, but its future custodian. The youth in him was rampant, and his strong vein of romance unsatisfied. He admitted--again aloud--that he was as romantic as he was practical. He would train to succeed his father, but meanwhile would distinguish himself in his own manner. He would use the wealth at his disposal, but the manner should be picturesque.