of the pleasure which ought naturally to attend it.  She spoiled the walk to the distant outlook, by stopping at every step, not merely to pick flowers, but to botanise on the weeds, and to calculate the distance advanced.  It is quite true that we ought to learn to do things irrespective of the reward; but plenty of opportunities will be given in the progress of life, and in much higher kinds of action, to exercise our sense of duty in severe loneliness.  We have no right to turn intellectual exercises into pure operations of conscience:  these ought to involve essential duty; although no doubt there is plenty of room for mingling duty with those; while, on the other hand, the highest act of suffering self-denial is not without its accompanying reward.  Neither is there any exercise of the higher intellectual powers in learning the mere grammar of a language, necessary as it is for a means.  And language having been made before grammar, a language must be in some measure understood, before its grammar can become intelligible.

Harry’s weak (though true and keen) life could not force its way into any channel.  His was a nature essentially dependent on sympathy.  It could flow into truth through another loving mind:  left to itself, it could not find the way, and sank in the dry sand of ennui and self-imposed obligations.  Euphra was utterly incapable of understanding him; and the boy had been dying for lack of sympathy, though neither he nor any one about him had suspected the fact.

There was a strange disproportion between his knowledge and his capacity.  He was able, when his attention was directed, his gaze fixed, and his whole nature supported by Hugh, to see deep into many things, and his remarks were often strikingly original; but he was one of the most ignorant boys, for his years, that Hugh had ever come across.  A long and severe illness, when he was just passing into boyhood, had thrown him back far into his childhood; and he was only now beginning to show that he had anything of the boy-life in him.  Hence arose that unequal development which has been sufficiently evident in the story.

In the afternoon, they went to the wood, and found the tree they had chosen for their nest.  To Harry’s intense admiration, Hugh, as he said, went up the tree like a squirrel, only he was too big for a bear even.  Just one layer of foliage above the lowest branches, he came to a place where he thought there was a suitable foundation for the nest.  From the ground Harry could scarcely see him, as, with an axe which he had borrowed for the purpose (for there was a carpenter’s work-shop on the premises), he cut away several small branches from three of the principal ones; and so had these three as rafters, ready dressed and placed, for the foundation of the nest.  Having made some measurements, he descended; and repairing with Harry to the work-shop, procured some boarding and some tools, which Harry assisted in carrying to the tree.  Ascending again,