ding in fields of its
own, only fifteen miles from where her mother lived, and twelve miles
from Dumfries. Everything had been made comfortable for them by her
mother, and in the farm-cottage near were his brother and sister, Jane
and Alexander Carlyle, who had three men and two women; and Mrs.
Carlyle herself always one servant. Much has been written of her
hardships here,--and they were very real hardships to her; but from his
point of view they did not seem so bad. She did some work, but one
cannot help thinking that with so many about her, if she habitually did
such drudgery as is represented, it was her own fault. There will come
domestic crises in all households, when the hands of the mistress must
take hold to save from chaos; but on the whole it would seem that she
was not so very great a martyr in this.

The lack of society was the real evil; and this Carlyle did not feel,
absorbed as he was in his mighty work, his brain burning with the great
thoughts to which he must give utterance. How could he appreciate the
vacuity of her life,--who had always had young and cheerful company
about her, and a mother to pity and cheer her smallest sorrow? It was
very pitiful that he could not see, but not so very strange. Many
another man would have been equally obtuse.

His sisters would not have minded it; he did not mind it, and it was not
given him to see that she minded it as much as she really did. For it is
certain that those seven years left marks upon her which she never
outgrew. They almost seem to have changed her very nature. Yet Carlyle
with his peasant nature did not see it, but wrote cheerfully upon a
time, "Jane is far heartier, now that she has got to work." A mistake,
says Froude: "Mrs. Carlyle had not strength for household work, and
doing it, she permanently broke down her health."

And again Carlyle writes, with a little more appreciation of the
situation:--

"Her life beside me, constantly writing here, is but a dull one;
however, she seems to desire no other. . . . I tell her many times
there is much for her to do, if she were trained for it,--her whole
sex to deliver from the bondage of frivolity, dollhood, and
imbecility, into the freedom of valor and womanhood."

Of the solitude which had nearly killed his wife, he after a time
wearied himself; and then he effected a change. One laughs to think of
the second moving, and wonders if it was as bad as the first, which he
th