her; she has taken the child’s hand; she is speaking now, now listening; and on her face kindness looks like happiness. Perhaps she is happy that moment. And Waife? he is turning aside his weatherbeaten mobile countenance with his hand anxiously trembling upon the young scholar’s arm. The scholar whispers, “Are you satisfied with me?” and Waife answers in a voice as low but more broken, “God reward you! Oh, joy! if my pretty one has found at last a woman friend!” Poor vagabond, he has now a calm asylum, a fixed humble livelihood; more than that, he has just achieved an object fondly cherished. His past life,--alas! what has he done with it? His actual life, broken fragment though it be, is at rest now. But still the everlasting question,--mocking terrible question, with its phrasing of farce and its enigmas of tragical sense,--“WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?” Do with what? The all that remains to him, the all he holds! the all which man himself, betwixt Free-will and Pre-decree, is permitted to do. Ask not the vagrant alone: ask each of the four there assembled on that flying bridge called the Moment. Time before thee,--what wilt thou do with it? Ask thyself! ask the wisest! Out of effort to answer that question, what dream-schools have risen, never wholly to perish,--the science of seers on the Chaldee’s Pur-Tor, or in the rock-caves of Delphi, gasped after and grasped at by horn-handed mechanics to-day in their lanes and alleys. To the heart of the populace sink down the blurred relics of what once was the law of the secretest sages, hieroglyphical tatters which the credulous vulgar attempt to interpret. “WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?” Ask Merle and his Crystal! But the curtain descends! Yet a moment, there they are,--age and childhood,--poverty, wealth, station, vagabondage; the preacher’s sacred learning and august ambition; fancies of dawning reason; hopes of intellect matured; memories of existence wrecked; household sorrows; untold regrets; elegy and epic in low, close, human sighs, to which Poetry never yet gave voice: all for the moment personified there before you,--a glimpse for the guess, no more. Lower and lower falls the curtain! All is blank! BOOK VI. CHAPTER I. Etchings of Hyde Park in the month of June, which, if this history escapes those villains the trunk-makers, may be of inestimable value to unborn antiquarians.--Characters, long absent, reappear and give some account of themselves.