“It would be very ungenerous, then, to conceal your secret,” cried Onslow; “for assuredly the art of killing time here, without killing one's self, is worth knowing.” “The misfortune is, I cannot communicate it; that is, even giving me credit for possessing one, my skill is like that of some great medical practitioner, who has learnt to look on disease with such practised eyes that the appropriate remedy rises as it were instinctively to his mind, he knows not how or why, and who dies, without being able to transmit the knowledge to a successor. I have, somewhat in the same way, become an accomplished idler; and with such success that the dreariest day of rain that ever darkened the dirty windows of a village inn, the most scorching dog-day that ever emptied the streets of an Italian city, and sent all the inhabitants to their siesta, never hipped me. I have spent a month with perfect satisfaction in quarantine, and bobbed for three weeks in a calm at sea, with no other inconvenience than the moans of my fellow-passengers. There 's no secret in it, Mr. Onslow; or, if there be, it lies in this pretty discovery, that we are always bored by our habit of throwing ourselves on the resources of somebody else, who, in his turn, looks out for another, and so on. Now, a man in a fever never dreams of cooling his hand by laying it on another patient's cheek; yet this is what we do. To be thoroughly bored, you must associate yourself with some half-dozen tired, weary, dyspeptic twaddles, and make up a joint-stock bank of your several incapacities, learn to growl in chorus, and you'll be able to go home and practise it as a solo.” “And have you been completely alone here of late?” said George, who began to fear that the sermon on ennui was not unaccompanied by a taste of the evil. “Occasionally I 've chatted for half an hour with two gentlemen who reside here, a Colonel Haggerstone--” “By the way, who is he?” broke in Onslow, eagerly. “He has been traced back to Madras, but the most searching inquiries have failed to elicit anything further.” “Is he the man they called Arlington's Colonel Haggerstone?” Jekyl nodded; but with an air that seemed to say, he would not enter more deeply into the subject. “And your other companion who is he?” “Peter Dalton, of I am ashamed to say I forget where,” said Jekyl; who, at once assuming Dalton's bloated look, in a well-feigned Irish accent, went on: “a descendant of as ancient and as honorable a familee as any in the three kingdoms, and if a little down in the world bad luck to them that done it! just as ready as ever he was to enjoy agreeable society and the ganial flow of soul.” “He 's the better of the two, I take it,” said Onslow.