e
grave under accumulated misery--to see all this in a character I
venerate, and apparently without resource or comfort, wounded
every feeling of my soul, and I left him the next day almost as
low-spirited as himself.'

But Young himself was soon to pass into the same Valley of the Shadow,
not so much of Death as of Joyless Life. His beloved and idolized
Bobbin died on July 14, 1797. She seems to have been a wise little
maiden, to whom her father wrote most affectionate letters, full of
rather unsuitable details, political and financial and otherwise, and
not scrupling to speak of the child's mother in a disagreeable manner.
Bobbin replies with delightful composure to these worrying letters:

'I have just got six of the most beautiful little rabbits you ever
saw; they skip about so prettily you can't think, and I shall have
some more in a few weeks. Having had so much physic, I am right
down tired of it. I take it still twice a day--my appetite is
better. What can you mind politics so for? I don't think about
them.--Well, good-bye, and believe me, dear papa, your dutiful
Daughter.'

After poor little Bobbin's death, it happened to Arthur Young even as
his mother foretold. Carrots and crops and farming tours hastily
retreat, and we find the eminent agriculturist busying himself, with
the same seriousness and good faith he had devoted to the rotation of
the crops, with the sermons and treatises of Clarke and Jortin and
Secker and Tillotson, etc., and all to discover what had become of his
dear little Bobbin. His outlook upon the world was changed--the great
parties at Petworth, at Euston, at Woburn struck him differently; the
huge irreligion of the world filled him as for the first time with
amazement and horror:

'How few years are passed since I should have pushed on eagerly to
Woburn! This time twelve months I dined with the Duke on
Sunday--the party not very numerous, but chiefly of rank--the
entertainment more splendid than usual there. He expects me to-day,
but I have more pleasure in resting, going twice to church, and
eating a morsel of cold lamb at a very humble inn, than partaking
of gaiety and dissipation at a great table which might as well be
spread for a company of heathens as English lords and men of
fashion.'

It is all mighty fine calling this religious hypochondria and
depression of spirits. It is one of the facts of life. Young stuck to