ptions to his abstracted
scholarly moods at which, it is true, he used to fret and to pshaw and
to cry Papa! but which nevertheless always did him good, and freshened
up the stream of his thoughts. And, next, it was the conviction of thine
understanding that a little society and boon companionship, and the
proud pleasure of showing his ruins and presiding at the hall of his
forefathers, would take Roland out of those gloomy reveries into which
he still fell at times. And, thirdly, for us young people, ought not
Blanche to find companions in children of her own sex and age? Already
in those large black eyes there was something melancholy and brooding,
as there is in the eyes of all children who live only with their elders.
And for Pisistratus, with his altered prospects, and the one great
gnawing memory at his heart,--which he tried to conceal from himself,
but which a mother (and a mother who had loved) saw at a glance,--what
could be better than such union and interchange with the world around
us, small though that world might be, as woman, sweet binder and blender
of all social links, might artfully effect? So that thou didst not go,
like the awful Florentine,--

"Sopra for vanita che par persona,"--

"over thin shadows that mocked the substance of real forms," but rather
it was the real forms that appeared as shadows, or vanita.

What a digression! Can I never tell my story in a plain, straightforward
way? Certainly I was born under Cancer, and all my movements are
circumlocutory, sideways, and crab-like.

CHAPTER V.

"I think, Roland," said my mother, "that the establishment is
settled,--Bolt, who is equal to three men at least; Primmins, cook and
housekeeper; Molly, a good, stirring girl, and willing (though I've
had some difficulty in persuading her to submit not to be called Anna
Maria). Their wages are but a small item, my clear Roland."

"Hem!" said Roland; "since we can't do with fewer servants at less
wages, I suppose we must call it small."

"It is so," said my mother, with mild positiveness. "And indeed, what
with the game and fish, and the garden and poultry-yard, and your own
mutton, our housekeeping will be next to nothing."

"Hem!" again said the thrifty Roland, with a slight inflection of the
beetle brows. "It may be next to nothing, ma'am,--sister,--just as a
butcher's shop may be next to Northumberland House; but there is a vast
deal between nothing and that next neighbor you have