One instance more to close a long digression. I have read of a baron in the fifteenth century who once in his life said a good thing. He was a coarse, brutal marauder, illiterate enough to have satisfied Earl Angus, and as unromantic as the Integral Calculus. He was mortally wounded in a skirmish; and when his men came back from the pursuit, he was bleeding to death, resting against a tree. When they lifted him up, they noticed his eyes fixed with a curious, complacent expression on the red stream that surged and gurgled out of his wound, just as a _gourmand_ looks at a bumper of a rare vintage held up to the light. They heard him growl to himself, "_Qu'il coule rouge et fort, le bon vieux sang de Bourgogne_." And then he fell back--dead.
O Publicola Thompson! Phösphor to the Tower Hamlets and Boanerges of the platform--will you not allow that, amid a wilderness of weeds, this one fair plant flourishes under "the cold shade?"
"Shy she was, and I thought her cold; Thought her proud, and fled over the sea; Filled I was with folly and spite, When Ellen Adair was dying for me."
When I came to Livingstone's chambers on the following morning, I found him alone. His head was resting listlessly against the back of the vast easy-chair in which he was reclining, and his face, thrown out in relief against the crimson velvet, looked haggard and drawn. The calumet--not of peace--was between his lips, and the dense blue clouds were wreathing round him like a Scotch mist. On a table near lay a heap of gold and notes. He had finished the night at his club, where lansquenet had been raging till long after sunrise. Fortune had been more kind than usual, and the fruits of "passing" eight times lay before me. An open liqueur-case close at his elbow showed that play was not the only counter-excitement to which he had resorted.
I hoped to have found him in a repentant mood, but his first words undeceived me: "I start for Paris by this evening's train;" and then I remarked all about me the signs of immediate departure.
I only had a confused idea of what had happened, and was anxious to know the truth, but he was very brief in his answers: the particulars of what had passed I learned long afterward.