of life; her babies clung to them, and grew large of limb.
From her they learnt to speak; from her they learnt the names of trees
and flowers and all things beautiful around them; learnt, too, less by
precept than from fair example, the sweetness and sincerity wherewith
such mothers, and such alone, can endow their offspring. Later she was
their instructress in a more formal sense; for this also she held to be
her duty, up to the point where other teaching became needful. By
method and good-will she found time for everything, ruling her house
and ordering her life so admirably, that to those who saw her only in
hours of leisure she seemed to be at leisure always. She would have
felt it an impossible thing to abandon her children to the care of
servants; reluctantly she left them even for an hour or two when other
claims which could not be neglected called her forth. In play-time they
desired no better companion, for she was a child herself in gaiety of
heart and lissom sportiveness. No prettier sight could be seen at
Greystone than when, on a summer afternoon, they all drove in the pony
carriage to call on friends, or out into the country. Nowadays it was
often her eldest boy who held the reins, a bright-eyed, well-built lad,
a pupil at the old Grammar-School, where he used the desk at which his
father had sat before him. Whatever fault of boyhood showed itself in
Harry Morton, he knew not the common temptation to be ashamed of his
mother, or to flout her love.

For holiday they never crossed the sea. Morton himself had been but
once abroad, and that in the year before his father's death, when he
was trying to make up his mind what profession he should take up; he
then saw something of France and of Italy. Talking with travelled
friends, he was wont to praise himself in humorous vein for the sober
fixity of his life, and to quote, in that mellow tone which gave such
charm to his talk, the line from Claudian, '_Erret et extremos alter
scrutetur Iberos_; for he had several friends to whom a Latin or a
Greek quotation was no stumbling-block. Certain of his college
companions, men who had come to hold a place in the world's eye, were
glad to turn aside from beaten tracks and smoke a pipe at Greystone
with Basil Morton--the quaint fellow who at a casual glance might pass
for a Philistine, but was indeed something quite other. His wife had
never left her native island. 'I will go abroad,' she said, 'when my
boys can take me.'