_Nescio._ “Impromptus! Ha! Ha! Why, Apple, we were in the bed-room here, when you came in before, and heard you practising on your impromptus!” _Apple_, (coloring with shame, vexation, and alarm.) “How--how--what, you did, did you? Pretty good hoax, though, wasn’t it? Don’t tell the fellows ’twas _your_ hoax. But being Dumpling, I’ve got the _dumps_, ha! ha! so I think I’ll go home and write on my autobiography.” _Tristo._ “Do so, and don’t forget this chapter.” (Exit Apple with a hang-dog air.) _Tristo._ “Incorrigible!” _Nescio._ “Utterly! ha! ha! it’s worth a dozen comedies.” * * * * * As if by a secret and common impulse, the laugh and jest ceased, and both became silent. Nescio sat by one window, emitting from a fragrant Havana languid and infrequent puffs. His varying countenance expressed a train of thoughts as motley as his mind, where the weighty and the sober were linked and mingled with the light and the ludicrous, and feelings and reflections came trooping by, robed in a livery of serio-comic strangeness. He was thinking of the mystic links that bind together the seen and the unseen--of the glorious, expansive, elastic mind--that ‘_sine fine fines_’--of the invisible shadings of the mental into the passionate, and of the passionate into the corporeal--of the attenuated conduits that bear reciprocally between the mind and body a gush of joy or a thrill of anguish. He turned from the puzzling maze, and by no unnatural diversion, his thoughts passed to some of the most wonderful emanations from this mysterious source--the productions of the ‘world’s sole demigod’--Ariel and Caliban and Puck--the sisters three, and Titania with her faery train--and Falstaff, and the good king Malcolm, and the maddened Lear--poor, shattered Hamlet, and Othello ‘the dusky Moor,’ ----“Whose hand, Like the base Judæan, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe.” Then came up in re-awakened life the fond musings of his own early boyhood, and he was pleased with the contemplation, all groundless and fruitless as they were, for he smiled at his former folly, and thought himself too wise to be again deceived.