us the heavenly manna.  We have made another God from which no prophet can win us.  We prostrate ourselves before the calf of gold.  This, dear Ireneus, must be a sad prospect for a heart like yours.  That all the respect for the past, for religion and misfortune, which exists in your heart, should rise at the prospect of what you have read to me, I can well enough understand.  Can you however, repress the wrong which offends you?  Can the evils of which you complain be prevented?  No, do what you will, there must ever be men, over whom the passion for power will exercise vast influence, and this feeling will always induce them to turn from the sinking to the rising star.  Even if you go to the depth of a desert, to the jungles of an Indian archipelago, to the woods at Caffraria, to the desert plains of North America, or to the Cordilleras, you will not escape from the miserable spectacles of human hypocrisy.  The Turks have a proverb which says, ‘Cure the hand you cannot spare.’  Now we can add to this maxim, ’Cure the hand which can serve you, satisfy your pride, avarice and egotism.’  Young and happy when you first entered on life, dear Ireneus, you have seen much.  A sudden revolution has covered your eyes with a cloud, and unexpected treachery has pierced your heart.  Time will show you many others, and if you do not give yourself up to useless misanthropy, the most foolish and idle of all maladies, you will learn to resign yourself to chagrins you cannot avoid.  In your time of distress you will draw near to those who do not deceive your esteem.  You will, without hatred and anger, be able to look at those whom base calculation or cowardice has led astray, and if you congratulate yourself that you have not followed their example, you will be glad that heaven has endowed you with more firmness and a loftier ambition.”

The wisdom of these reasonings touched the heart of Ireneus, but could not subdue it.  The ardent young man continued to curse those whom he had seen in the ranks of legitimacy, and who now had linked themselves with the revolution.  Often, to avoid the remonstrances of his uncle, or not to annoy him by recrimination, he wandered alone across the desert plains, calling all the deserters of the cause he loved by name, and sometimes he even resolved, like a true knight-errant, to set out and demand an account of their crime.  When he returned from these solitary walks, his uncle, thinking that all argument would at such times be useless, said nothing.  Ebba however looked at him with eager sympathy.

PART IV.