s if it had never been.

At length, just as an elderly gentleman of very dignified presence
happened to be passing, a large bubble sailed majestically down, and
burst right against his nose! He looked up,--at first with a stern,
keen glance, which penetrated at once into the obscurity behind the
arched window,--then with a smile which might be conceived as diffusing
a dog-day sultriness for the space of several yards about him.

"Aha, Cousin Clifford!" cried Judge Pyncheon. "What! Still blowing
soap-bubbles!"

The tone seemed as if meant to be kind and soothing, but yet had a
bitterness of sarcasm in it. As for Clifford, an absolute palsy of
fear came over him. Apart from any definite cause of dread which his
past experience might have given him, he felt that native and original
horror of the excellent Judge which is proper to a weak, delicate, and
apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength. Strength
is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.
There is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle
of his own connections.

XII The Daguerreotypist

IT must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so
active as Phoebe could be wholly confined within the precincts of the
old Pyncheon House. Clifford's demands upon her time were usually
satisfied, in those long days, considerably earlier than sunset. Quiet
as his daily existence seemed, it nevertheless drained all the
resources by which he lived. It was not physical exercise that
overwearied him,--for except that he sometimes wrought a little with a
hoe, or paced the garden-walk, or, in rainy weather, traversed a large
unoccupied room,--it was his tendency to remain only too quiescent, as
regarded any toil of the limbs and muscles. But, either there was a
smouldering fire within him that consumed his vital energy, or the
monotony that would have dragged itself with benumbing effect over a
mind differently situated was no monotony to Clifford. Possibly, he
was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly
assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights,
sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more
practised with the world. As all is activity and vicissitude to the
new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had
undergone a kind of new creation, after its long-suspended life.

Be the cause