noonday with perfect composure of countenance
and decency of gait, with not the
slightest appearance of vacancy in his eyes
or wildness in his manner, from one end of
Oxford Street to the other, without his hat,
and let every one of the thousands of hat-
wearing people whom he passes be asked
separately what they think of him, how
many will abstain from deciding instantly
that he is mad, on no other evidence than
the evidence of his bare head? Nay, more:
let him politely stop each one of those
passengers, and let him explain in the plainest
form of words, and in the most intelligible
manner, that his head feels more easy and
comfortable without a hat than with one,
how many of his fellow mortals who decided
that he was mad on first meeting him, will
change their opinion when they part from
him, after hearing his explanation? In the
vast majority of cases, the very explanation
itself would be accepted as an excellent
additional proof that the intellect of the
hatless man was indisputably deranged.

Starting at the beginning of the march of
life out of step with the rest of the mortal
regiment, Andrew Treverton paid the penalty
of his irregularity from his earliest days. He
was a phenomenon in the nursery, a butt at
school, and a victim at college. The ignorant
nursemaid reported him as a queer
child; the learned schoolmaster genteelly
varied the phrase, and described him as an
eccentric boy; the college tutor, harping on
the same string, facetiously likened his head
to a roof, and said there was a slate loose in
it. When a slate is loose, if nobody fixes it
in time, it ends by falling off. In the roof of
a house we view that consequence as a
necessary result of neglect; in the roof of a
man's head we are generally very much
shocked and surprised by it.

Overlooked in some directions and
misdirected in others, Andrew's uncouth capacities
for good tried helplessly to shape
themselves. The better side of his eccentricity took
the form of friendship. He became violently
and unintelligibly fond of one amonghis school-
fellows—a boy, who treated him with no
especial consideration in the playground, and
who gave him no particular help in the class.
Nobody could discover the smallest reason for
it, but it was nevertheless a notorious fact
that Andrew's pocket-money was always at
this boy's service, that Andrew ran about
after him like a dog, and that Andrew over
and over again took the blame and punishment
on his own shoulders which ought to
have fallen on the shoulders of his friend.
When, a few years afterwards, that friend
went to college, the lad petitioned to be sent
to college too, and attached himself there
more closely than ever to the strangely-
chosen comrade of his schoolboy days. Such
devotion as this must have touched any man
possessed of ordinary generosity of disposition.
It made no impression whatever on
the inherently base nature of Andrew's
friend. After three years of intercourse at
college—intercourse which was all selfishness
on one side and all self-sacrifice on the other
—the end came, and the light was let in
cruelly on Andrew's eyes. When his purse
grew light in his friend's hand, and when his
acceptances were most numerous on his
friend's bills, the brother of his honest affection,
the hero of his simple admiration,
abandoned him to embarrassment, to ridicule, and
to solitude, without the faintest affectation of
penitence—without so much, even, as a word
of farewell.

He returned to his father's house, a soured
man at the outset of life—returned to be
upbraided for the debts that he had contracted
to serve the man who had heartlessly
outraged and shamelessly cheated him. He left
home in disgrace, to travel, on a small
allowance. The travels were protracted,
and they ended, as such travels often do, in
settled expatriation. The life he led, the
company he kept, during his long residence
abroad, did him permanent and fatal harm.
When he at last returned to England, he
presented himself in the most hopeless of all
characters—the character of a man who
believes in nothing. At this period of his life,
his one chance for the future lay in the
good results which his brother's influence
over him might have produced. The two had
hardly resumed their intercourse of early
days, when the quarrel occasioned by
Captain Treverton's marriage broke it off for
ever. From that time, for all social interests
and purposes, Andrew was a lost man. From
that time, he met the last remonstrances
that were made to him by the last friends
who took any interest in his fortunes, always
with the same bitter and hopeless form of
reply: " My dearest friend forsook and
cheated me," he would say. "My only
brother has quarrelled with me for the sake
of a play-actress. What am I to expect of
the rest of mankind, after that? I have
suffered twice for my belief in others—I
will never suffer a third time. The wise
man is the man who does not disturb his
heart at its natural occupation of pumping
blood through his body. I have gathered
my experience abroad and at home; and
have learnt enough to see through the
delusions of life which look like realities to other
men's eyes, but which have betrayed
themselves years ago to mine. My business in
this world is to eat, drink, sleep and die.
Everything else is superfluity—and I have
done with it."

The few people who ever cared to inquire
about him again, after being repulsed by such
an avowal as this, heard of him, three or four
years after his brother's marriage, in the
neighbourhood of Bayswater. Local reports
described him as having bought the first
cottage he could find, which was cut off
from other houses by a wall all round it. It