me? Will it not be better still if
your son--yours--restore to your Austin all that he lost, no matter how?
If through your son, mother, you do indeed make the world hear of your
husband's genius, restore the spring to his mind, the glory to his
pursuits; if you rebuild even that vaunted ancestral name which is
glory to our poor sonless Roland; if your son can restore the decay of
generations, and reconstruct from the dust the whole house into which
you have entered, its meek, presiding angel,--all, mother! if this can
be done, it will be your work; for unless you can share my ambition,
unless you can dry those eyes, and smile in my face, and bid me go, with
a cheerful voice, all my courage melts from my heart, and again I say, I
cannot leave you!"

Then my mother folded her arms round me, and we both wept, and could not
speak; but we were both happy.

CHAPTER IV.

Now the worst was over, and my mother was the most heroic of us all. So
I began to prepare myself in good earnest, and I followed Trevanion's
instructions with a perseverance which I could never, at that young day,
have thrown into the dead life of books. I was in a good school, amongst
our Cumberland sheep-walks, to learn those simple elements of rural
art which belong to the pastoral state. Mr. Sidney, in his admirable
"Australian Hand-Book," recommends young gentlemen who think of becoming
settlers in the Bush to bivouac for three months on Salisbury Plain.
That book was not then written, or I might have taken the advice;
meanwhile I think, with due respect to such authority, that I went
through a preparatory training quite as useful in seasoning the future
emigrant. I associated readily with the kindly peasants and craftsmen,
who became my teachers. With what pride I presented my father with a
desk, and my mother with a work-box, fashioned by my own hands! I made
Bolt a lock for his plate-chest, and (that last was my magnum opus,
my great masterpiece) I repaired and absolutely set going an old
turret-clock in the tower that had stood at 2 p.m. since the memory of
man. I loved to think, each time the hour sounded, that those who heard
its deep chime would remember me. But the flocks were my main care. The
sheep that I tended and helped to shear, and the lamb that I hooked out
of the great marsh, and the three venerable ewes that I nursed through a
mysterious sort of murrain which puzzled all the neighborhood,--are they
not written in thy loving ch