etrayed;
and I would rather not tell you the rest of it. Poor Blyth had to leave
Cambridge first, where he was sure to have done very well indeed, and at
his wish he was sent afloat, where he would have done even better; and
then, as his father's troubles deepened, and ended in his death of heart
complaint, the poor boy was left to keep his broken-hearted mother upon
nothing but a Latin Grammar. And I fear it is like a purser's dip. But
here we are at Stonnington--a long steep pitch. Let us slacken sail, my
dears, as we have brought no cockswain. Neither of you need land, you
know, but I shall go into the schoolroom."

"One thing I want to know," said the active-minded Dolly, as the horses
came blowing their breath up the hill: "if his father was Sir Edmond,
and he is the only child, according to all the laws of nature, he ought
to be Sir Blyth Scudamore."

"It shows how little you have been out--as good Mrs. Twemlow expresses
it--that you do not even understand the laws of nature as between a
baronet and a knight."

"Oh, to be sure; I recollect! How very stupid of me! The one goes on,
and the other doesn't, after the individual stops. But whose fault is
it that I go out so little? So you see you are caught in your own trap,
papa."

CHAPTER VIII

A LESSON IN THE AENEID

In those days Stonnington was a very pretty village, and such it
continued to be until it was ravaged by a railway. With the railway came
all that is hideous and foul, and from it fled all that is comely. The
cattle-shed, called by rail-highwaymen "the Station," with its roof of
iron Pan-pipes and red bull's-eyes stuck on stack-poles, whistles and
stares where the grand trees stood and the village green lay sleeping.
On the site of the gray-stone grammar school is an "Operative
Institute," whose front (not so thick as the skin of a young ass) is
gayly tattooed with a ringworm of wind-bricks. And the old manor-house,
where great authors used to dine, and look out with long pipes through
the ivy, has been stripped of every shred of leaf, and painted red and
yellow, and barge-boarded into "the Temperance Tap."

Ere ever these heathen so furiously raged, there was peace and content,
and the pleasure of the eyes, and of neighborly feeling abundance.
The men never burst with that bubble of hurry which every man now is
inflated with; and the women had time enough to mind one another's
affairs, without which they grow scandalous. And the trees, th