"Horses? Ah, yes, to be sure, I come back to riches. Nay, my dear uncle, you are going to tell me that the estates are mortgaged deep as ever--I know. But allow me to tell you there is all the world's difference between poverty that is behindhand with its interest, and poverty that has to trust God for its next meal." At the eating-house to which I carried him he held out his scarred palms to me across the table. "They have worked my way for me from the Alps," said he. "I left my crown there, and"--he laughed wearily--"I come back to find another monarch in the act of laying aside a greater one. My God! The vanity of it!" He drank off a glass of wine. "Find me a bed, Uncle Gervase," said he. "I feel that I can sleep the clock round." We rode out of London next day. He started in a fret to be home, but this impatience declined by the way, and by the time we crossed Tamar had sunk to a lethargy. Sore was I to mark the dull gaze he lifted (by habit) at the corner of the road where Constantine comes into view; and sorer the morning after, when, having put gun into his hand and packed him off with Diana, the old setter, at his heel, I met him an hour later returning dejectedly to the house. For the next three or four months he went listless as a man dragging a wounded limb. But since spring brought back rod and angle, I think and pray that the voice of running water (best medicine in Nature) begins to cure him. He has written the foregoing narrative in a hot fit which, while it lasted, more than once kept his lamp burning till daybreak; and although the last chapter was no sooner finished than he flung the whole away in disgust. I have hopes of him. I may even live to see a child running about these silent terraces . . . But this, my dearest wish, outruns all present indications; and if Prosper ever marries again it will be as his father married, and not for love.[1] By good fortune I am able to supply the reader with some later news of two members of the expedition, Mr. Fett and Mr. Badcock. It came to me, early this summer, in the following letter:-- _To Gervase Arundel, Esq., of Constantine in Cornwall, England_. "Venice. Ash Wednesday (4.30 a.m.), 1761. "Excellent Sir,