A brief sojourn at the homestead had sufficed to arrange the affairs of the carefully-managed estate, and the young surgeon returned to his post aboard ship, in distant oriental seas. The increasing infirmity of his sister had finally induced the resignation of his cherished commission, and brought the man of thirty-five back to his home, where the "old familiar faces" seemed to have vanished forever; and, in lieu thereof, legions of cold-eyed strangers carelessly confronted him. Emancipated from all restraint, and early consigned to the guidance of his boyish caprices and immature judgment, Ulpian Grey's character had unfolded itself under circumstances peculiarly favorable for the fostering of selfishness and the development of idiosyncrasies. As a plant, unmolested by man and beast, germinates, expands, and freely and completely manifests all its inherent tendencies, whether detrimental or beneficial to humanity, so Dr. Grey's matured manhood was no distorted or discolored result of repeated educational experiments, but a thoroughly normal efflorescence of an unbiassed healthful nature. Habits of unwavering application and searching study, contracted in collegiate cloisters, tightened their grasp upon him, as he wandered away from the quiet precincts of _Alma Mater_ and into the crowded noisy campus of life; and even the gregarious and convivial manners prevalent aboard ship failed to divert his attention from the prosecution of scientific researches, or to retard his rapid progress in classical scholarship. For the treasures of knowledge thus patiently and indefatigably garnered through a series of years, travel proved an invaluable polyglot commentator, analyzing, comparing, annotating, and italicizing, and had converted his mind into a vast, systematically arranged pictorial encyclopaedia of miscellaneous lore, embellished with delicate etchings, noble engravings, and gorgeous illuminations,--a thesaurus where _savants_ might seek successfully for _data_, and whence artists could derive grand types, and pure tender coloring. Reverent and loving appreciation of the intrinsically "true, good, and beautiful" was part of the homage that his nature rendered to its Creator, and instead of flowering into a morbid and maudlin sentimentality which craves low-browed, long straight-nosed, undraped statuettes in every nook and corner,--or dwarfs the soul and pins it to the surplice of some theologic _dogmata_ claiming infallibility--or coffins the intellect in cramped, shallow, psychological categories,--it bore fruit in a wide-eyed, large-hearted, liberal-minded eclecticism, which, waging no crusade against the various Saladins of modern systems, quietly possessed itself of the really valuable elements that constitute the basis of every ethical, aesthetic, and scientific creed, which has for any length of time levied black-mail on the credulity of mankind.