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268 268 AN ODD LIFE.

sonably, I was proud of my strength of will, which had enabled me in one day to abandon tobacco without a pang, and seven-course dinners without repining. I slept a good deal, too, at this period, whereas I had previously been greatly exercised by insomnia. But these joys of the senses were as nothing to the joys of the intellect. An exquisite curiosity played like a sea-breeze about my long-stagnant soul. All my early interests revived ; worldly propositions I had thought settled showed themselves unstable and volant ; everything was shaken by the moving spirit of youth. The- ology, poetry, and even metaphysics became alive ; all sorts of unpractical questions became suddenly burning. I saw in myself the seeds of a great thinker : a felicitous congruity of opposite capacities that had never before met in a single man — the sobriety of age tempered by the audacity of youth, fire and water, judgment and inspiration. I was revolutionist and reactionary in one. I read all the new books, and agreed with all the old."

" All you tell me only makes the pathos of your premature death more intolerable," I said in moved accents. "You are, like Keats and Chatterton, — only an earlier edition, — an inheritor of unfulfilled renown."

The little blue eyes smiled wistfully at me.

" Not at all," said the wee rose-lips, with a quiver. " Don't you see, I have already dodged Death ? Evidently, if I had taken my second year in its natural order, I should have been cut short by croup at the outset. Apparently I had enough vital energy in me to have lasted till seventy-seven, if I could only get over the croup. I think one ought to be satisfied with having survived himself by thirty ■ odd years."

" Yes, if you put it like that, the pathos lightens," I ad- mitted. " Of course I saw from the first that you were