hat I know, even a great
general, if his tender humanity had not stood in the way of his military
mathematics.

But as it was,--with his slow pulse never stimulated by action, and too
little stirred by even scholarly ambition,--my father's mind went on
widening and widening till the circle was lost in the great ocean of
contemplation; and Roland's passionate energy, fretted into fever by
every let and hindrance in the struggle with his kind, and narrowed more
and more as it was curbed within the channels of active discipline and
duty, missed its due career altogether, and what might have been the
poet, contracted into the humorist.

Yet who that had ever known ye, could have wished you other than ye
were, ye guileless, affectionate, honest, simple creatures?--simple
both, in spite of all the learning of the one, all the prejudices,
whims, irritabilities, and crotchets of the other. There you are, seated
on the height of the old Roman camp, with a volume of the Stratagems
of Polyaenus (or is it Frontinus?) open on my father's lap; the sheep
grazing in the furrows of the circumvallations; the curious steer gazing
at you where it halts in the space whence the Roman cohorts glittered
forth; and your boy-biographer standing behind you with folded arms,
and--as the scholar read, or the soldier pointed his cane to each
fancied post in the war--filling up the pastoral landscape with the
eagles of Agricola and the scythed cars of Boadicea!

CHAPTER VI.

"It is never the same two hours together in this country," said my Uncle
Roland, as, after dinner, or rather after dessert, we joined my mother
in the drawing-room.

Indeed, a cold, drizzling rain had come on within the last two hours,
and though it was July, it was as chilly as if it had been October. My
mother whispered to me, and I went out; in ten minutes more, the logs
(for we live in a wooded country) blazed merrily in the grate. Why could
not my mother have rung the bell and ordered the servant to light a
fire? My dear reader, Captain Roland was poor, and he made a capital
virtue of economy!

The two brothers drew their chairs near to the hearth, my father at the
left, my uncle at the right; and I and my mother sat down to "Fox and
Geese."

Coffee came in,--one cup for the Captain, for the rest of the party
avoided that exciting beverage. And on that cup was a picture of--His
Grace the Duke of Wellington!

During our visit to the Roman camp my mother had b