came to close quarters with the members of this great and
highly distinguished family, you soon found yourself fundamentally
astonished: you had a sensation come over you, as if you were trying,
like Moses, to draw water from a rock, without his delegated power. There
was a goodly outside of things before you, but nothing came of it. You
talked, hoping to get talking in return, but you got little more than
"noes" and "yeses," and "oh! indeeds!" and "reallys," and sometimes not
even that, but a certain look of aristocratic dignity or dignification,
that was meant to serve for all answers. There was a sort of resting on
aristocratic oars or "sculls," that were not to be too vulgarly handled.
There was a feeling impressed on you, that eight-hundred years of descent
and ten thousand a-year in landed income did not trouble themselves with
the trifling things that gave distinction to lesser people--such as
literature, fine arts, politics, and general knowledge. These were very
well for those who had nothing else to pride themselves on, but for the
Rockvilles--oh! certainly they were by no means requisite.

In fact, you found yourself, with a little variation, in the predicament
of Cowper's people,

--who spent their lives
In dropping buckets into empty wells,
And _growing tired_ of drawing nothing up.

Who hasn't often come across these "dry wells" of society; solemn gulfs
out of which you can pump nothing up? You know them; they are at your
elbow every day in large and brilliant companies, and defy the best
sucking-buckets ever invented to extract anything from them. But the
Rockvilles were each and all of this adust description. It was a family
feature, and they seemed, if either, rather proud of it. They must be so;
for proud they were, amazingly proud; and they had nothing besides to be
proud of, except their acres, and their ancestors.

But the fact was, they could not help it. It was become organic. They had
acted the justice of peace, maintained the constitution against upstarts
and manufacturers, signed warrants, supported the church and the house of
correction, committed poachers, and then rested on the dignity of their
ancestors for so many generations, that their skulls, brains,
constitutions, and nervous systems, were all so completely moulded into
that shape and baked into that mould, that a Rockville would be a
Rockville to the end of time, if God and Nature would have allowed it.