rovocative of our combative
tendencies than the blast of the trumpet and the gleam of the banner!

CHAPTER V.

"Brother," said Mr. Caxton, "will walk with you to the Roman
encampment."

The Captain felt that this proposal was meant as the greatest
peace-offering my father could think of; for, first, it was a very long
walk, and my father detested long walks; secondly, it was the sacrifice
of a whole day's labor at the Great Work. And yet, with that quick
sensibility which only the generous possess, Uncle Roland accepted at
once the proposal. If he had not done so, my father would have had a
heavier heart for a month to come. And how could the Great Work have
got on while the author was every now and then disturbed by a twinge of
remorse?

Half an hour after breakfast, the brothers set off arm-inarm; and I
followed, a little apart, admiring how sturdily the old soldier got over
the ground, in spite of the cork leg. It was pleasant enough to listen
to their conversation, and notice the contrasts between these two
eccentric stamps from Dame Nature's ever-variable mould,--Nature, who
casts nothing in stereotype; for I do believe that not even two fleas
can be found identically the same.

My father was not a quick or minute observer of rural beauties. He had
so little of the organ of locality that I suspect he could have lost his
way in his own garden. But the Captain was exquisitely alive to external
impressions,--not a feature in the landscape escaped him. At every
fantastic gnarled pollard he halted to gaze; his eye followed the lark
soaring up from his feet; when a fresher air came from the hill-top his
nostrils dilated, as if voluptuously to inhale its delight. My father,
with all his learning, and though his study had been in the stores of
all language, was very rarely eloquent. The Captain had a glow and a
passion in his words which, what with his deep, tremulous voice and
animated gestures, gave something poetic to half of what he uttered. In
every sentence of Roland's, in every tone of his voice and every play
of his face, there was some outbreak of pride; but unless you set him on
his hobby of that great ancestor the printer, my father had not as much
pride as a homeopathist could have put into a globule. He was not proud
even of not being proud. Chafe all his feathers, and still you could
rouse but the dove. My father was slow and mild, my uncle quick and
fiery; my father reasoned, my uncle imagined; m