Ever charming, ever new, When will the landscape tire the view? The fountains fall, the rivers flow, The woody valleys, warm and low, The windy summit, wild and high, Roughly rushing on the sky! The pleasant seat, the chapel tower, The naked rock, the shady bower, The town and village, dome and farm, Each gave each a double charm, As pearls upon a woman's arm. --_Dyer._ Ishmael and his aged retainer rode on, down the elm-shaded avenue and out upon the turnpike road. There seemed to be a special fitness in the relations between these two. Ishmael, you are aware, was a very handsome, stately, and gracious young man. And the professor was the tallest, gravest, and most respectable of servants. Ah, their relative positions were changed since twelve years before, when they used to travel that same road on foot, as "boss" and "boy." Many men in Ishmael's position would have shrunk from all that would have reminded them of the poverty from which they had sprung; and would have avoided as much as possible all persons who were familiar with their early struggles. But Ishmael did not so. While pressing forward to the duties and distinctions of the future, with burning aspiration and untiring energy, he held the places and persons of the past in most affectionate remembrance. To a vain or haughty man in Ishmael's situation there could scarcely have occurred a more humiliating circumstance than the constant presence of the poor, old odd-jobber, whose "boy" he had once been. But Ishmael was neither the one nor the other; he was intellectual and affectionate. His breadth of mind took in his past memories, his present position, and his future prospects, and saw them all in perfect harmony. And his depth of heart found room for the humblest friends of his wretched infancy, as well as for the higher loves of his manhood's prime. Ishmael was at ease with the old odd-job man, and he would have been at ease with his imperial majesty, had circumstances brought him into the immediate circle of the Czar; because from the depths of his soul he was intensely conscious of the innate majesty of man. Ishmael had no more need of a servant than a coach has of a fifth wheel. He took the professor into his service for no other purpose than to take care of the poor old man and make him happy, never foreseeing how really useful and important this gray-haired retainer would eventually become to him. He was planning only the professor's happiness, not his own convenience. But he found both. As they rode along that pleasant September morning he was pleasing himself with thinking how that intelligent old man, starved all his life for mental food, would delight himself amid the intellectual wealth of his new life. They were approaching the turn-stile at the cross-roads, memorable for the weary watchings of Lady Hurstmonceux.