CHAPTER XVIII.
Certainly it is a glorious fever,--that desire To Know! And there are few sights in the moral world more sublime than that which many a garret might afford, if Asmodeus would bare the roofs to our survey,--namely, a brave, patient, earnest human being toiling his own arduous way, athwart the iron walls of penury, into the magnificent Infinite, which is luminous with starry souls.
So there sits Leonard the Self-taught in the little cottage alone: for, though scarcely past the hour in which great folks dine, it is the hour in which small folks go to bed, and Mrs.Fairfield has retired to rest, while Leonard has settled to his books.
He had placed his table under the lattice, and from time to time he looked up and enjoyed the stillness of the moon.

Well for him that, in reparation for those hours stolen from night, the hardy physical labour commenced with dawn.

Students would not be the sad dyspeptics they are, if they worked as many hours in the open air as my scholar-peasant.

But even in him you could see that the mind had begun a little to affect the frame.

They who task the intellect must pay the penalty with the body.
Ill, believe me, would this work-day world get on if all within it were hard-reading, studious animals, playing the deuce with the ganglionic apparatus.
Leonard started as he heard the knock at the door; the parson's well-known voice reassured him.