TELPHERAGE cliii 



duty/ lie wrote to Miss Bell ; ' it was all too beautiful for grief,' 

 lie said to me ; but the emotion, call it by what name we please, 

 shook him to his depths, his wife thought he would have broken 

 his heart when he must demolish the Captain's trophy in the 

 dining-room, and he seemed thenceforth scarcely the same 

 man. 



These last years were indeed years of an excessive demand Telphei 

 upon his vitality ; he was not only worn out with sorrow, he age ' 

 was worn out by hope. The singular invention to which he 

 gave the name of telpherage, had of late consumed his time, 

 overtaxed his strength and overheated his imagination. The 

 words in which he first mentioned his discovery to me c I am 

 simply Alnaschar ' were not only descriptive of his state of 

 mind, they were in a sense prophetic ; since whatever fortune 

 may await his idea in the future, it was not his to see it bring forth 

 fruit. Alnaschar he was indeed ; beholding about him a world 

 all changed, a world filled with telpherage wires ; and seeing 

 not only himself and family but all his friends enriched. It was 

 his pleasure, when the company was floated, to endow those 

 whom he liked with stock; one, at least, never .knew that he 

 was a possible rich man until the grave had closed over his 

 stealthy benefactor. And however Fleeming chafed among ma- 

 terial and business difficulties, this rainbow vision never faded ; 

 and he, like his father and his mother, may be said to have died 

 upon a pleasure. But the strain told, and he knew that it was 

 telling. ' I am becoming a fossil,' he had written five years 

 before, as a kind of plea for a holiday visit to his beloved Italy. 

 ' Take care ! If I am Mr. Fossil, you will be Mrs. Fossil, and 

 Jack will be Jack Fossil, and all the boys will be little fossils, 

 and then we shall be a collection.' There was no fear more 

 chimerical for Fleeming ; years brought him no repose ; he was as 

 packed with energy, as fiery in hope, as at the first ; weariness, 

 to which he began to be no stranger, distressed, it did not quiet 

 him. He feared for himself, not without ground, the fate which 

 had overtaken his mother ; others shared the fear. In the 

 changed life now made for his family, the elders dead, the sons 

 going from home upon their education, even their tried domestic 



