m care.

'I like my trade,' he said once to Harvey Rolfe; 'it's clean and sweet
and useful. The Socialist would revile me as a middleman; but society
can't do without me just yet, and I ask no more than I fairly earn. I
like turning over a sample of grain; I like the touch of it, and the
smell of it. It brings me near to the good old Mother Earth, and makes
me feel human.'

His house was spacious, well built, comfortable. The furniture, in
great part, was the same his parents had used; solid mahogany, not so
beautiful as furniture may be made, but serviceable, if need be, for
another fifty years. He had a library of several thousand volumes,
slowly and prudently collected, representing a liberal interest in all
travail of the mind, and a special taste for the things of classical
antiquity. Basil Morton was no scholar in the modern sense, but might
well have been described by the old phrase which links scholar with
gentleman. He lived by trade, but trade did not affect his life. The
day's work over, he turned, with no feeling of incongruity, to a page
of Thucydides, of Tacitus, or to those less familiar authors who
lighted his favourite wanderings through the ruins of the Roman Empire.
Better grounded for such studies than Harvey Rolfe, he pursued them
with a steadier devotion and with all the advantages of domestic peace.
In his mental habits, in his turns of speech, there appeared perhaps a
leaning to pedantry; but it was the most amiable of faults, and any
danger that might have lurked in it was most happily balanced and
corrected by the practical virtues of his life's companion.

Mrs. Morton had the beauty of perfect health, of health mental and
physical. To describe her face as homely was to pay it the highest
compliment, for its smile was the true light of home, that never
failed. _Filia generosi_, daughter of a house that bred gentlewomen,
though its ability to dower them had declined in these latter days, she
conceived her duty as wife and mother after the old fashion, and was so
fortunate as to find no obstacle in circumstance. She rose early; she
slept early; and her day was full of manifold activity. Four children
she had borne--the eldest a boy now in his twelfth year, the youngest a
baby girl; and it seemed to her no merit that in these little ones she
saw the end and reason of her being. Into her pure and healthy mind had
never entered a thought at conflict with motherhood. Her breasts were
the fountain