shilling; but no, there was no
such good reason to give for it.

The yearning of all ages, especially dotage, is for a relapse to the
infantile state when all playthings were held in common. And this wisest
of all places (in its own opinion) had a certain eccentric inclination
towards the poetic perfection when it will be impossible to steal,
because there will be nothing left worth stealing. Still everybody
here stuck to his own rights, and would knock down anybody across them,
though finding it very nice to talk as if others could have no such
standing-point. Moreover, they had sufficient common-sense to begin with
the right end foremost, and to take a tender interest in one another's
goods, moveable, handy, and divisible; instead of hungering after hungry
land, which feeds nobody, until itself well fed and tended, and is as
useless without a master as a donkey or a man is. The knowledge of these
rudiments of civilization was not yet lost at Springhaven; and while
everybody felt and even proved his desire to share a neighbour's
trouble, nobody meddled with any right of his, save his right to be
assisted.

Among them throve the old English feeling of respect for ancient
families, which is nowadays called "toadyism" by those whom it baulks
of robbery. To trade upon this good-will is almost as low a thing as any
man can do, even when he does it for good uses. But to trade upon it,
for the harm of those who feel it, and the ruin of his country, is
without exception the very lowest--and this was what Caryl Carne was at.

He looked at the matter in a wholly different light, and would have
stabbed any man who put it as above; for his sense of honour was as
quick and hot as it was crooked and misguided. His father had been
a true Carne, of the old stamp--hot-blooded, headstrong, stubborn,
wayward, narrow-minded, and often arrogant; but--to balance these faults
and many others--truthful, generous, kind-hearted, affectionate, staunch
to his friends, to his inferiors genial, loyal to his country, and
respectful to religion. And he might have done well, but for two sad
evils--he took a burdened property, and he plunged into a bad marriage.

His wife, on the other hand, might have done well, if she had married
almost anybody else. But her nature was too like his own, with feminine
vanity and caprice, French conceit, and the pride of noble birth--in the
proudest age of nobility--hardening all her faults, and hammering the
rive