mistake about Cush and Mizraim.

But for her visitors Dorothea too might have been shut up in the
library, and would not have witnessed this scene of old Featherstone's
funeral, which, aloof as it seemed to be from the tenor of her life,
always afterwards came back to her at the touch of certain sensitive
points in memory, just as the vision of St. Peter's at Rome was inwoven
with moods of despondency. Scenes which make vital changes in our
neighbors' lot are but the background of our own, yet, like a
particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become associated for
us with the epochs of our own history, and make a part of that unity
which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness.

The dream-like association of something alien and ill-understood with
the deepest secrets of her experience seemed to mirror that sense of
loneliness which was due to the very ardor of Dorothea's nature. The
country gentry of old time lived in a rarefied social air: dotted apart
on their stations up the mountain they looked down with imperfect
discrimination on the belts of thicker life below. And Dorothea was
not at ease in the perspective and chilliness of that height.

"I shall not look any more," said Celia, after the train had entered
the church, placing herself a little behind her husband's elbow so that
she could slyly touch his coat with her cheek. "I dare say Dodo likes
it: she is fond of melancholy things and ugly people."

"I am fond of knowing something about the people I live among," said
Dorothea, who had been watching everything with the interest of a monk
on his holiday tour. "It seems to me we know nothing of our neighbors,
unless they are cottagers. One is constantly wondering what sort of
lives other people lead, and how they take things. I am quite obliged
to Mrs. Cadwallader for coming and calling me out of the library."

"Quite right to feel obliged to me," said Mrs. Cadwallader. "Your rich
Lowick farmers are as curious as any buffaloes or bisons, and I dare
say you don't half see them at church. They are quite different from
your uncle's tenants or Sir James's--monsters--farmers without
landlords--one can't tell how to class them."

"Most of these followers are not Lowick people," said Sir James; "I
suppose they are legatees from a distance, or from Middlemarch.
Lovegood tells me the old fellow has left a good deal of money as well
as land."

"Think of that now! when so many younger sons ca