But now the young and fresh imagination
    Finds traces of their presence everywhere,
And peoples with a new and bright creation
    The clear blue chambers of the sunny air.

For them the gate of many a fairy palace
    Opes to the ringing bugle of the bee,
And every flower-cup is a golden chalice,
    Wine-filled, in some grand elfin revelry.

Quaint little eyes from grassy nooks are peering;
    Each dewy leaf is rich in magic lore;
The foam-bells, down the merry brooklet steering,
    Are fairy-freighted to some happier shore.

Stern theorists, with wisdom overreaching
    The aim of wisdom, in your precepts cold,
And with a painful stress of callous teaching,
    That withers the young heart into the old,

What is the gain if all their flowers were perished,
    Their vision-fields for ever shorn and bare,
The mirror shattered that their young faith cherished,
     Showing the face of things so very fair?

Time hath enough of ills to undeceive them,
    And cares will crowd where dreams have dwelt before;
Oh, therefore, while the heart is trusting, leave them
    Their happy childhood and their fairy lore!

HUNTED DOWN.

BY CHARLES DICKENS.

IN TWO PORTIONS. PORTION THE FIRST.
I.

MOST of us see some romances in life. In my
capacity as Chief-Manager of a Life Assurance
Office, I think I have, within the last thirty
years, seen more romances than the generality of
men, however unpromising the opportunity may
at first sight seem.

As I have retired, and live at my ease, I possess
the means that I used to want, of considering
what I have seen, at leisure. My experiences
have a more remarkable aspect, so reviewed,
than they had when they were in progress. I
have come home from the Play now, and can
recal the scenes of the Drama upon which the
curtain has fallen, free from the glare, bewilderment,
and bustle, of the Theatre.

Let me recal one of these Romances of the
real world.

There is nothing truer (I believe) than physiognomy,
taken in connexion with manner. The art
of reading that book of which Eternal Wisdom
obliges every human creature to present his or
her own page with the individual character
written on it, is a difficult one, perhaps, and is
little studied. It may require some natural aptitude,
and it must require (for everything does)
some patience and some pains. That, these are
not usually given to it— that, numbers of people
accept a few stock common-place expressions of
face as the whole list of characteristics, and
neither seek nor recognise the refinements that are
truest— that You, for instance, give a great deal
of time and attention to the reading of music
Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Hebrew, if you
please, and do not qualify yourself to read the
face of the master or mistress looking over your
shoulder teaching it to you— I assume to be five
hundred times more probable than improbable.
Perhaps some little self-sufficiency may be at the
bottom of this; facial expression requires no
study from you, you think; it comes by nature
to you to know enough about it, and you are
not to be taken in.

I confess, for my part, that I have been taken
in, over and over and over again. I have been
taken in by acquaintances, and I have been
taken in (of course) by friends; far oftener by
friends than by any other class of persons. How
came I to be so deceived? Had I quite misread
their faces? No. Believe me, my first
impression of those people, founded on face and
manner alone, was invariably true. My mistake
was, in suffering them to come nearer to me,
and explain themselves away.

II.

THE partition which separated my own office
from our general outer office, in the City, was
of thick plate-glass. I could see through it what
passed in the outer office, without hearing a
word. I had had it put up, in place of a wall that
had been there for years— ever since the house
was built. It is no matter whether I did or did
not make the change, in order that I might derive
my first impression of strangers who came
to us on business, from their faces alone, without
being influenced by anything they said.
Enough to mention that I turned my glass partition
to that account, and that a Life Assurance
Office is at all times exposed to be practised
upon by the most crafty and cruel of the human
race.

It was through my glass partition that I first
saw the gentleman whose story I am going to
tell.

He had come in without my observing it, and
had put his hat and umbrella on the broad counter,
and was bending over it to take some papers
from one of the clerks. He was about forty or
so, dark, exceedingly well dressed in black—
being in mourning— and the hand he extended
with a polite air, had a particularly well-fitting
black kid glove upon it. His hair, which was
elaborately brushed and oiled, was parted
straight up the middle; and he presented this
parting to the clerk, exactly (to my thinking) as
if he had said, in so many words: " You must
take me, if you please, my friend, just as I show
myself. Come straight up here, follow the
gravel path, keep off the grass, I allow no trespassing."

I conceived a very great aversion to that man,
the moment I thus saw him.

He had asked for some of our printed forms,
and the clerk was giving them to him, and explaining
them. An obliged and agreeable smile
was on his face, and his eyes met those of the
clerk with a sprightly look. (I have known a vast
quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not
looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional
idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty
out of countenance, any day in the week, if
there is anything to be got by it.)

I saw, in the corner of his eyelash, that he