Roland Lansdell was most miserably tired of himself, and all the world except Isabel Gilbert. Life, which is so short when measured by art, science, ambition, glory; life, which always closes too soon upon the statesman or the warrior, whether he dies in the prime of life, like Peel, or flourishes a sturdy evergreen like Palmerston; whether he perishes like Wolfe on the heights of Quebec, or sinks to his rest like Wellington in his simple dwelling by the sea: life, so brief when estimated by a noble standard, is cruelly long when measured by the empty pleasures of an idle worldling with fifteen thousand a year. Emile Angier has very pleasantly demonstrated that the world is much smaller for a rich man than it is for a poor one. My lord the millionaire rushes across wide tracts of varied landscape asleep in the padded corner of a first-class carriage, and only stops for a week or so here and there in great cities, to be bored almost to death by cathedrals and valhallas, picture-galleries and ruined Roman baths, "done" in the stereotyped fashion. While the poorer traveller, jogging along out-of-the-way country roads, with his staff in his hand, and his knapsack on his shoulder, drops upon a hundred pleasant nooks in this wide universe, and can spend a lifetime agreeably in seeing the same earth that the millionaire, always booked and registered all the way through, like his luggage, grows tired of in a couple of years. We have only to read Sterne's "Sentimental Journey" and Dickens's "Uncommercial Traveller," in order to find out how much there is in the world for the wanderer who has eyes to see. Read the story of Mr. Dickens's pedestrian rambles, and then read William Beckford's delicious discontented _blasé_ letters, and see the difference between the great writer, for whom art is long and life is only too short, and the man of pleasure, who squandered all the wealth of his imagination upon the morbid phantasma of "Vathek," and whose talent could find no higher exercise than the planning of objectionable towers. The lesson which Mr. Lansdell was called upon to learn just now was a very difficult one. For the first time in his life he found that there was something in the world that he could not have; for the first time he discovered what it was to wish wildly, madly for one precious treasure out of all the universe; and to wish in vain. This morning he was not such a purposeless wanderer as he usually was; he was going to Hurstonleigh church, in the hope of seeing Isabel Gilbert, and ascertaining for himself whether there was any foundation for Lady Gwendoline's insinuation. He wanted to ascertain this; but above all, he wanted to _see_ her--only to see her; to look at the pale face and the dark eyes once more. Yes, though she were the basest and shallowest-hearted coquette in all creation.