ew
Testaments. Alongside the extracts he copies in the very perfection of
hand-writing extracts from Mede (the only man, according to Theobald, who
really understood the Book of Revelation), Patrick, and other old
divines. He works steadily at this for half an hour every morning during
many years, and the result is doubtless valuable. After some years have
gone by he hears his children their lessons, and the daily oft-repeated
screams that issue from the study during the lesson hours tell their own
horrible story over the house. He has also taken to collecting a _hortus
siccus_, and through the interest of his father was once mentioned in the
Saturday Magazine as having been the first to find a plant, whose name I
have forgotten, in the neighbourhood of Battersby. This number of the
Saturday Magazine has been bound in red morocco, and is kept upon the
drawing-room table. He potters about his garden; if he hears a hen
cackling he runs and tells Christina, and straightway goes hunting for
the egg.

When the two Miss Allabys came, as they sometimes did, to stay with
Christina, they said the life led by their sister and brother-in-law was
an idyll. Happy indeed was Christina in her choice, for that she had had
a choice was a fiction which soon took root among them--and happy
Theobald in his Christina. Somehow or other Christina was always a
little shy of cards when her sisters were staying with her, though at
other times she enjoyed a game of cribbage or a rubber of whist heartily
enough, but her sisters knew they would never be asked to Battersby again
if they were to refer to that little matter, and on the whole it was
worth their while to be asked to Battersby. If Theobald's temper was
rather irritable he did not vent it upon them.

By nature reserved, if he could have found someone to cook his dinner for
him, he would rather have lived in a desert island than not. In his
heart of hearts he held with Pope that "the greatest nuisance to mankind
is man" or words to that effect--only that women, with the exception
perhaps of Christina, were worse. Yet for all this when visitors called
he put a better face on it than anyone who was behind the scenes would
have expected.

He was quick too at introducing the names of any literary celebrities
whom he had met at his father's house, and soon established an all-round
reputation which satisfied even Christina herself.

Who so _integer vitae scelerisque purus_, it was