And Wisdom’s self Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, Where with her best nurse Contemplation, She plumes her feathers and lets grow her wings, That in the various bustle of resort Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impaired. —_Milton._ No star is ever lost we once have seen: We always may be what we might have been. —_Proctor._ Elsworth spent a few days in Paris, and then determined he would go on to Spain. He dreaded discovery, for ridicule was more terrible to him than any bodily danger. He had been only two days in Paris when he passed a London friend, who, however, did not notice him. He neither wanted to be chaffed by old companions, nor urged back to a life with which he had resolved to break. He was not strong enough to fight—the highest bravery is sometimes to fly. He felt that, though the world is so small, he would be less likely to meet acquaintances in Spain, especially if he did not stay in the capital. As he entered the night express for Madrid, and settled himself in a corner of the carriage for sleep, he felt some sinking at heart, a sense of his isolation and a misgiving of the adequacy of his motive which had driven him into his solitude. This age of ours, he thought, is not the time for sacrifice to principle. Retreats for clergymen and devotees might be right because customary; but, whoever heard of a medical man, scarcely emerged from his hospital, giving up all his professional prospects, abandoning friends and position, country and habits, because a great sense of non-response to the higher call of duty, had suddenly come upon him? Yet history was full of such precedents. Men had done all this and more to seek an island in unknown seas, to trace the sources of a river, to get gold, to seek for novelty, to gratify small ambitions, to chase the merest butterfly of a pleasure. He had seen, as a lightning flash in an instant reveals a yawning precipice or some great danger in time to be averted, that he was descending from his higher self, and leading a life which could not be worth living for any man who had once known a better and followed nobler things. Could it be wrong to break with the past like this? Was it not just this that the Great Teacher meant when He said, “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off?” Was it not good for him to go out into the desert for awhile, and let God speak to him in the silence? He had said to himself that he would live to make the world better for his living. He had vowed himself to the order of those who smooth away some of the roughnesses of this life for weaker brethren; not a very wonderful thing after all, to do, in face of what had been done for him by others. True, this is the age of “doing nothing without a _quid pro quo_” paid down in hard cash.