bout 'em, the more he overhauled the case in this light,
the more strongly did his poor wife's conduct in improving the blood and
breed of the Petrick family win his heart. He considered what ugly,
idle, hard-drinking scamps many of his own relations had been; the
miserable scriveners, usurers, and pawnbrokers that he had numbered among
his forefathers, and the probability that some of their bad qualities
would have come out in a merely corporeal child, to give him sorrow in
his old age, turn his black hairs gray, his gray hairs white, cut down
every stick of timber, and Heaven knows what all, had he not, like a
skilful gardener, minded his grafting and changed the sort; till at
length this right-minded man fell down on his knees every night and
morning and thanked God that he was not as other meanly descended fathers
in such matters.

It was in the peculiar disposition of the Petrick family that the
satisfaction which ultimately settled in Timothy's breast found
nourishment. The Petricks had adored the nobility, and plucked them at
the same time. That excellent man Izaak Walton's feelings about fish
were much akin to those of old Timothy Petrick, and of his descendants in
a lesser degree, concerning the landed aristocracy. To torture and to
love simultaneously is a proceeding strange to reason, but possible to
practice, as these instances show.

Hence, when Timothy's brother Edward said slightingly one day that
Timothy's son was well enough, but that he had nothing but shops and
offices in his backward perspective, while his own children, should he
have any, would be far different, in possessing such a mother as the
Honourable Harriet, Timothy felt a bound of triumph within him at the
power he possessed of contradicting that statement if he chose.

So much was he interested in his boy in this new aspect that he now began
to read up chronicles of the illustrious house ennobled as the Dukes of
Southwesterland, from their very beginning in the glories of the
Restoration of the blessed Charles till the year of his own time. He
mentally noted their gifts from royalty, grants of lands, purchases,
intermarriages, plantings and buildings; more particularly their
political and military achievements, which had been great, and their
performances in art and letters, which had been by no means contemptible.
He studied prints of the portraits of that family, and then, like a
chemist watching a crystallization, began to examin