ching his face
jealously. Did she think that in that thoughtful face there was regret
for the old love? Blanche, who had been very sad, and had wept much and
quietly since they put on her the mourning, and told her that she had no
brother (though she had no remembrance of the lost), began now to
evince infantine curiosity and eagerness to catch the first peep of her
father's beloved tower. And Blanche sat on my knee, and I shared her
impatience. At last there came in view a church-spire, a church, a plain
square building near it, the parsonage (my father's old home), a long,
straggling street of cottages and rude shops, with a better kind of
house here and there, and in the hinder ground a gray, deformed mass of
wall and ruin, placed on one of those eminences on which the Danes loved
to pitch camp or build fort, with one high, rude, Anglo-Norman tower
rising from the midst. Few trees were round it, and those either
poplars or firs, save, as we approached, one mighty oak,--integral
and unscathed. The road now wound behind the parsonage and up a steep
ascent. Such a road,--the whole parish ought to have been flogged for
it! If I had sent up a road like that, even on a map, to Dr. Herman, I
should not have sat down in comfort for a week to come!

The fly-coach came to a full stop.

"Let us get out," cried I, opening the door, and springing to the ground
to set the example.

Blanche followed, and my respected parents came next. But when Mrs.
Primmins was about to heave herself into movement--

"Papce!" said my father. "I think, Mrs. Primmins, you must remain in, to
keep the books steady."

"Lord love you!" cried Mrs. Primmins, aghast.

"The subtraction of such a mass, or moles,--supple and elastic as all
flesh is, and fitting into the hard corners of the inert matter,--such
a subtraction, Mrs. Primmins, would leave a vacuum which no natural
system, certainly no artificial organization, could sustain. There would
be a regular dance of atoms, Mrs. Primmins; my books would fly here,
there, on the floor, out of the window!

"'Corporis officium est quoniam omnia deorsum.'

"The business of a body like yours, Mrs. Primmins, is to press
all things down, to keep them tight, as you will know one of these
days,--that is, if you will do me the favor to read Lucretius, and
master that material philosophy of which I may say, without flattery, my
dear Mrs. Primmins, that you are a living illustration."

These, the first wor