I went abroad for the general election, and if I don’t know how much, on the Continent, I forgot, I at least know how much I missed him. At a distance, in a foreign land, ignoring, abjuring, unlearning him, I discovered what he had done for me. I owed him, oh, unmistakably! certain noble conceptions. I had lighted my little taper at his smoky lamp, and lo! it continued to twinkle. But the light it gave me just showed me how much more I wanted. I was pursued of course by letters from Mrs. Saltram, which I didn’t scruple not to read, though I was duly conscious that her embarrassments would now be of the gravest. I sacrificed to propriety by simply putting them away, and this is how, one day as my absence drew to an end, my eye, as I rummaged in my desk for another paper, was caught by a nam
