The villanous _Beehive_! Bread was worked out of it, certainly; but fame, but hope for the future--certainly not. Milton's _Paradise Lost_ would have perished without a sound, had it appeared in the _Beehive_. Fine things were there in a fragmentary crude state, composed by Burley himself. At the end of a week they were dead and forgotten--never read by one man of education and taste; taken simultaneously and indifferently with shallow politics and wretched essays, yet selling, perhaps, twenty or thirty thousand copies--an immense sale; and nothing got out of them but bread and brandy! "What more would you have?" cried John Burley. "Did not stern old Sam Johnson say he could never write but from want?" "He might say it," answered Leonard; "but he never meant posterity to believe him. And he would have died of want, I suspect, rather than have written _Rasselas_ for the _Beehive_! Want is a grand thing," continued the boy, thoughtfully. "A parent of grand things. Necessity is strong, and should give us its own strength; but Want should shatter asunder, with its very writhings, the walls of our prison-house, and not sit contented with the allowance the jail gives us in exchange for our work." "There is no prison-house to a man who calls upon Bacchus--stay--I will translate to you Schiller's Dithyramb. 'Then see I Bacchus--then up come Cupid and Phoebus, and all the Celestials are filling my dwelling.'" Breaking into impromptu careless rhymes, Burley threw off a rude but spirited translation of that divine lyric. "O materialist!" cried the boy, with his bright eyes suffused. "Schiller calls on the gods to take him to their heaven with him; and ye would debase the Gods to a gin palace." "Ho, ho!" cried Burley with his giant laugh. "Drink, and you will understand the Dithyramb." CHAPTER VII. Suddenly one morning, as Leonard sat with Burley, a fashionable cabriolet, with a very handsome horse, stopped at the door--a loud knock--a quick step on the stairs, and Randal Leslie entered. Leonard recognized him and started. Randal glanced at him in surprise, and then, with a tact that showed he had already learned to profit by London life, after shaking hands with Burley, approached, and said with some successful attempt at ease, "Unless I am not mistaken, sir, we have met before. If you remember me, I hope all boyish quarrels are forgotten?" Leonard bowed, and his heart was still good enough to be softened. "Where could you two ever have met?" asked Burley. "In a village green, and in single combat," answered Randal, smiling; and he told the story of the Battle of the Stocks with a well-bred jest on himself. Burley laughed at the story. "But," said he, when this laugh was over, "my young friend had better have remained guardian of the village stocks, than come to London in search of such fortune as lies at the bottom of an inkhorn."