happiness will continue.

On leaving the University, his father sent for him to London. He
stayed there a short time, and mingled partially in its festivities;
but the pleasures of English dissipation have for a century been the
same, heartless without gayety, and dull without refinement. Nor
could Mordaunt, the most fastidious, yet warm-hearted of human beings,
reconcile either his tastes or his affections to the cold insipidities
of patrician society. His father's habits and evident distresses
deepened his disgust to his situation; for the habits were incurable
and the distresses increasing; and nothing but a circumstance which
Mordaunt did not then understand prevented the final sale of an estate
already little better than a pompons incumbrance.

It was therefore with the half painful, half pleasurable sensation
with which we avoid contemplating a ruin we cannot prevent that
Mordaunt set out upon that Continental tour deemed then so necessary a
part of education. His father, on taking leave of him, seemed deeply
affected. "Go, my son," said he, "may God bless you, and not punish
me too severely. I have wronged you deeply, and I cannot bear to look
upon your face."

To these words Algernon attached a general, but they cloaked a
peculiar, meaning: in three years, he returned to England; his father
had been dead some months, and the signification of his parting
address was already deciphered,--but of this hereafter.

In his travels Mordaunt encountered an Englishman whose name I will
not yet mention: a person of great reputed wealth; a merchant, yet a
man of pleasure; a voluptuary in life, yet a saint in reputation; or,