every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret;
that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that
every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there,
is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to
this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved,
and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the
depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights
glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other
things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut
with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page.
It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal
frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in
ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead,
my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable con-
solidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that
individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end.
In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is
there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in
their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

As to this, his natural and not to be alienated inheritance, the
messenger on horseback had exactly the same possessions as the
King, the first Minister of State, or the richest merchant in Lon-
don. So with the three passengers shut up in the narrow compass
of one lumbering old mail coach; they were mysteries to one
another, as complete as if each had been in his own coach and six,
or his own coach and sixty, with the breadth of a county between
him and the next.

The messenger rode back at an easy trot, stopping pretty often
at ale-houses by the way to drink, but evincing a tendency to keep
his own counsel, and to keep his hat cocked over his eyes. He had
eyes that assorted very well with that decoration, being of a sur-
face black, with no depth in the colour or form, and much too
near together--as if they were afraid of being found out in some-
thing, singly, if they kept too far apart. They had a sinister ex-
pression, under an old cocked hat like a three-cornered spittoon,
and over a great muffler for the chin and throat, which descended

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