scholars who never move from their cells are not the less an eminently
curious, bustling, active race, rightly understood. Even as old Burton
saith of himself--"Though I live a collegiate student, and lead a
monastic life, sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world,
I hear and see what is done abroad, how others run, ride, turmoil, and
macerate themselves in town and country,"--which citation sufficeth to
show that scholars are naturally the most active men of the world; only
that while their heads plot with Augustus, fight with Julius, sail with
Columbus, and change the face of the globe with Alexander, Attila, or
Mahomet, there is a certain mysterious attraction, which our improved
knowledge of mesmerism will doubtless soon explain to the satisfaction
of science, between that extremer and antipodal part of the human frame,
called in the vulgate "the seat of honor," and the stuffed leather of an
armed chair. Learning somehow or other sinks down to that part into
which it was first driven, and produces therein a leaden heaviness and
weight, which counteract those lively emotions of the brain that might
otherwise render students too mercurial and agile for the safety of
established order. I leave this conjecture to the consideration of
experimentalists in the physics.

I was still more delighted than my father with Uncle Jack. He was full
of amusing tricks, could conjure wonderfully, make a bunch of keys dance
a hornpipe, and if ever you gave him half-a-crown, he was sure to turn
it into a halfpenny.

He was only unsuccessful in turning my halfpennies into half-crowns.

We took long walks together, and in the midst of his most diverting
conversation my uncle was always an observer. He would stop to examine
the nature of the soil, fill my pockets (not his own) with great lumps