selfish convenience! And you would call it cruel too, Aunt
Catharine, if you could hear the poor creatures beg as a favour of Mr.
Holdsworth to be buried among their kin, and know how it has preyed on
the minds of the dying that they might not lie here among their own
people.'

'Change the subject, Fitzjocelyn,' said his father: 'the thing is done,
and cannot be undone.'

'The undoing is my daily thought,' said Louis. 'If I could have tried
my plan of weaving cordage out of cotton-grass and thistle-down, I
think I could have contrived for them.'

Mary looked up, and met his merry blue eye. Was he saying it so
gravely to try whether he could take her in? 'If you could--' she
said, and he went off into a hearty laugh, and finished by saying, so
that no one could guess whether it was sport or earnest, 'Even taking
into account the depredations of the goldfinches, it would be an
admirable speculation, and would confer immeasurable benefits on the
owners of waste lands. I mean to take out a patent when I have
succeeded in the spinning.'

'A patent for a donkey,' whispered Aunt Catharine. He responded with a
deferential bow, and the conversation was changed by the Earl; but
copper was still the subject uppermost with Louis, and no sooner was
dinner over than he followed the ladies to the library, and began
searching every book on metals and minerals, till he had heaped up a
pile of volumes, whence be rang the changes on oxide, pyrites, and
carbonate, and octohedron crystals--names which poor Mrs. Frost had
heard but too often. At last it came to certainty that he had seen the
very masses containing ore; he would send one to-morrow to Illershall
to be analysed, and bring his friend Dobbs down to view the spot.

'Not in my time,' interposed Lord Ormersfield. 'I would not wish for a
greater misfortune than the discovery of a mine on my property.'

'No wonder,' thought Mrs. Ponsonby, as she recollected Wheal Salamanca
and Wheal Catharine, and Wheal Dynevor, and all the other wheals that
had wheeled away all Cheveleigh and half Ormersfield, till the last
unfortunate wheal failed when the rope broke, and there were no funds
to buy a new one. No wonder Lord Ormersfield trembled when he heard
his son launch out into those easily-ascending conjectural
calculations, freely working sums in his head, so exactly like the old
Earl, his grandfather, that she could have laughed, but for sympathy
with the father, and anxiety