t
Christian resignation, think what it is to have feared for a son the
life of shame, and ask then if the sharpest grief to a father is in a
son's death of honor!

Years have passed, and two fair daughters play at the knees of Blanche,
or creep round the footstool of Austin, waiting patiently for the
expected kiss when he looks up from the Great Book, now drawing fast
to its close; or if Roland enter the room, forget all their sober
demureness, and unawed by the terrible Papoe! run clamorous for the
promised swing in the orchard, or the fiftieth recital of "Chevy Chase."

For my part, I take the goods the gods provide me, and am contented with
girls that have the eyes of their mother; but Roland, ungrateful
man, begins to grumble that we are so neglectful of the rights of
heirs--male. He is in doubt whether to lay the fault on Mr. Squills
or on us,--I am not sure that he does not think it a conspiracy of all
three to settle the representation of the martial De Caxtons on the
"spindle side." Whosoever be the right person to blame, an omission so
fatal to the straight line in the pedigree is rectified at last, and
Mrs. Primmins again rushes, or rather rolls--in the movement natural to
forms globular and spheral--into my father's room with--

"Sir, sir, it is a boy!"

Whether my father asked also this time that question so puzzling to
metaphysical inquirers, "What is a boy?" I know not: I rather suspect
he had not leisure for so abstract a question; for the whole household
burst on him, and my mother, in that storm peculiar to the elements
of the Mind Feminine--a sort of sunshiny storm between laughter and
crying--whirled him off to behold the Neogilos.

Now, some months after that date, on a winter's evening, we were all
assembled in the hall, which was still our usual apartment, since its
size permitted to each his own segregated and peculiar employment.
A large screen fenced off from interruption my father's erudite
settlement; and quite out of sight, behind that impermeable barrier, he
was now calmly winding up that eloquent peroration which will astonish
the world whenever, by Heaven's special mercy, the printer's devils have
done with "The History of Human Error." In another nook my uncle
had ensconced himself, stirring his coffee (in the cup my mother had
presented to him so many years ago, and which had miraculously escaped
all the ills the race of crockery is heir to), a volume of "Ivanhoe" in
the other hand