CHAPTER XIV

HOW MR. FRANCIS CAME TO THE LOWLANDS ONCE MORE At this point the industrious narrator passes from a sober tale into the realms of wild romance. Nor can he help himself. For take a wild young lad, or rather a serious man still in his youth, whose mind has been strung high by vain enthusiasms, who is spurred by a desperate hope. Conceive such an one to have climbed with difficulty the first steps of the ladder of virtue, to have curbed his mad fervours, to have bowed before the eternal commonplaces of love and duty, …