salt wind was blowing overland from thence, and, dilating his nostrils, opening his mouth, he inhaled the vivifying breeze in long breaths, while dully in his ears sounded the sullen thunder of the far-away billows rolling backward in sheets of shattered foam.

“Oh, Mother Nature! Demeter! Tellus! Isis!” he murmured, half closing his eyes; “tis only from thee I can hope to gain a panacea for this gnawing pain of life. I am weary of the world, tired of this aimless existence, but to thee will I fly to seek solace in thine healing balms.”

“Maurice!”

“Yes, sir.”

It was the rector who spoke, and the sound of his mellow voice roused the young man from his dreaming; therefore, resuming his normal manner, he lighted a cigarette and prepared to listen to the conversation of his old tutor.

“Are you still as good a German scholar as you used to be?” asked the rector deliberately.

“Not quite. My German, like myself, has grown somewhat rusty.”

17“Can you translate the word Selbstschmerz?”

17

Selbstschmerz

“Self-sickness.”

“Yes; that is about as good an English equivalent as can be found. Well, that is what you are suffering from.”

“Oh, wise physician,” retorted Roylands, with irony. “I know the cause of the disease myself, but what of the cure?”

“You must fall in love.”

“No one can fall in love to order.”

“Well, you must make the attempt at all events,” said Carriston, with a genial laugh; “it is the only cure for your disease.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Because it is your egotism makes you miserable. You care for no one but yourself, and are therefore bound to suffer from such selfishness. True happiness lies in self-abnegation, a virtue which all men preach, but few men practise. ‘Every man,’ says Goethe, ‘thinks himself the centre of the 

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