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130 will teach you wisdom. Go then, travel; experience personal privations and evils of every description, that you may learn to enjoy the pleasures that even now lie within your grasp, but which you spurn from you with contempt. So true it is that we never learn the real value of any blessing till we have experienced the misery that attends its privation."

"If this be the case," replied Edric, soothed in spite of himself, by the insinuating manner of the monk, "why should my feelings be an exception to the general rule? And since all our pleasures acquire a new zest by the force of contrast, and mine have long since lost all relish, is it not even wisdom to try the effect of change?"

"And yet it seems a folly," said Father Morris, in his smooth, plausible, hypocritical voice, with his eyes again fixed upon the ground, "to incur a certain evil in the hope of attaining an uncertain good."

Edric started, and fixed his eyes upon him, with an expression the monk well understood; and, not wishing again to provoke him past