e. Besides, you do not make half
enough show. You ought to go with the times. Why, at Cross's at
Cambridge their upstairs windows are hung full of spades and hoes and
such things, and you can see it is business up to the garret. I should
turn the parlour into a counting-house. It isn't the proper thing for
you to be standing always at that pokey little desk at the end of the
counter with a pen behind your ear. Turn the parlour, I say, into a
counting-house, and come out when Tom finds it necessary to call you.
That makes a much better impression. The rooms above the drawing-room
might be used for lighter goods, so as not to weight the floors too
much."

Mr. Furze was not sentimental, but he shuddered. In the big front
bedroom his father and he had been born. The first thing he could
remember was having measles there, and watching day by day, when he was a
little better, what went on in the street below. His brothers and
sisters were also born there. He remembered how his mother was shut up
there, and he was not allowed to enter; how, when he tried the door,
Nurse Judkins came and said he must be a good boy and go away, and how he
heard a little cry, and was told he had a new sister, and he wondered how
she got in. In that room his father had died. He was very ill for a
long time, and again Nurse Judkins came. He sat up with his father there
night after night, and heard the church clock sound all the hours as the
sick man lay waiting for his last. He rallied towards the end, and,
being very pious, he made his son sit down by the bedside and read to him
the ninety-first Psalm. He then blessed his boy in that very room, and
five minutes afterwards he had rushed from it, choked with sobbing when
the last breath was drawn. He did not relish the thought of taking down
the old four-post bedstead and putting rakes and shovels in its place,
but all he could say was--

"I don't quite fall in with it."

"_Why_ not? Now, my dear, I will make a bargain with you. If you can
assign a good reason, I will give it up; but, if you cannot, then, of
course, we ought to go, because _I_ have plenty of reasons for going.
Nothing can be fairer than that."

Mr. Furze was not quite clear about the "ought," although it was so fair,
but he was mute, and, after a pause, went into his shop. An accident
decided the question. Catharine was the lightest sleeper in the house,
notwithstanding her youth. Two nights after this cont