my book-shelves must be;
but I suppose the girls don't go much beyond the bindings: they don't
expect to get husbands by being blue."

"Not exactly, sir; reviews and title-pages constitute a good part of
modern literary acquirements. But upon my honour, sir, one hears young
ladies now talk of nothing but architecture and divinity. Botany is
quite gone out; and music, unless there's a twang of Papistry about it,
is generally voted a bore. In my younger days--(really, sir, you needn't
laugh, for I haven't had a love affair these two years)--in my younger
days, when one talked about similarity of tastes and so forth, it meant
that both parties loved moonlight, hated quadrilles, adored Moore's
Melodies, and were learning German; now, nine girls out of ten have a
passion for speculative divinity and social regeneration."

"Ay, one sort of nonsense does just as well for them as another: your
cousin Sophy bothers me to build an Elizabethan pigsty, and wanted her
poor mother to dance with the butler in the servants' hall last
Christmas, when the fellow was as drunk as an owl: I hope it mayn't end
in her figuring off herself with the footman; for Sophy is rather a pet
of mine, and a right-down English girl after all. But, Frank, if you
can't read in peace in the library, you surely could have a room fitted
up for yourself up stairs; and you shall have the great reading-desk,
with lights, that was your grandfather's, that stands in my little
sanctum; (he made more use of it, poor man, than I do;) or I don't know
but what I might spare you the little room itself, if it would suit
you--eh?"

"Oh, my dear father! I wouldn't disturb you on any account," said I,
rather alarmed at the extent of my worthy parent's liberality in the
cause, and fearing it might end in the offer of the whole family to pack
themselves in the attics, and leave me a first floor to
myself--calculating, too, the amount of hard reading commensurate with
such imposing preparations. "What would become of the justice business
of the parish, sir, if we shut up your tribunal? I don't suppose my
mother would like to have the constables and the illegitimates
introduced either into the drawing-room or the kitchen," (this was, as I
meant it to be, a poser; if Mr Hawthorne senior had a hobby, it was his
magisterial authority.) "The fact is, that at home, up-stairs or
down-stairs, I couldn't read. I should have not only my own idleness,
but the various idlenesses of the