He well knew that the Doctor yet bore no good-will to Kelly, and might
possibly thwart his designs, to the undoing of any good purposed by the
strange transactions that had already occurred; he resolved, therefore,
to let this day pass, ere he opened his lips on the subject. But how to
while away the hours until evening was a most embarrassing problem.
Sleep he had tried, but he found no wish to repeat the experiment;
reading was just then foreign to his humour; mathematics must, that day,
go unstudied. After beating time to at least a dozen strange metres, he
hit upon the happy contrivance of writing a love-song, as a kind of
expedient to restore the equilibrium. He was rather unskilled at the
work; but the pen becomes eloquent when the soul moves it. We will,
however, leave him at this thrifty employment, having no design, gentle
reader, to make the occasion as wearisome to thee as to himself. Having
the power to annihilate both time and space, let us watch the round sun,
as he threw his last look, that evening, on the scene of this marvellous
history. The old walls of the college, and the church tower, were
invested with a gorgeous apparel of light, as though illumined for some
gay festival, some season of rejoicing, when gladness shines out visibly
in the shape of bonfires and torches.
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