While Arthur turned over the contents of my curiosity drawer, and Alice examined my collection of “pieces,” with permission to select three of the prettiest for pincushions, Margaret read me Emily’s first letter from Hardsand. All goes on satisfactorily. She finds herself quite equal to the charge of the children, and Mrs. Pevensey tells her she more than equals her expectations, and that she shall leave her at the head of the school-room department with perfect confidence. Emily says, that so many things, common to the Pevenseys, are new and delightful to her—their polished manners and delightful conversation, the numerous little elegances about them, the well-conducted servants, luxuriously-furnished rooms, abundance of nice books, &c., all add something to her enjoyment. As for her position among them, she does not mind it at all; in fact, she is flattered by the confidence Mrs. Pevensey places in her, the obedience of the children, and the respect of the servants. She admires the sea, and the fine rough coast, and enjoys the daily walks on the sands. Arbell seems to like her, and she likes Arbell. “When the children are gone to bed,” she writes, “and Arbell is in the drawing-room, you cannot imagine how I enjoy lying on the sofa and reading ‘Tremaine.’ But sometimes Mrs. Pevensey looks in, and says, ‘Miss Prout, do come and join us—unless you are tired.’ Then I spring up immediately, for I think it would neither show good manners nor good feeling to hang back; and the result is that I get a cheerful evening, and am made to feel completely one of themselves.”
The Pevenseys were to cross the Channel the next morning: they were all in excellent spirits.
August is the month when the fields are ripe to harvest, and when, to use David’s joyous imagery, “The little valleys stand so thick with corn that they laugh and sing.” That is a beautiful line in a Scotch song, which, describing a graceful, pretty young girl, says—
“Like waving corn her mien.”
Nothing can be more graceful than the motion of corn, stirred by the light summer air—not even the dancing, in his boyish days, of one of our greatest civil engineers—now, alas! dead. Light as feather-down, and as if it were the pleasure of his existence to float on his native element—the air—the next moment you might see him deep in some abstruse question with his father, grave as if he had never known a smile. (“Ut in vitâ, sic in studiis, pulcherrimum et humanissimum existimo, severitatem comitatemque misure, ne illa in tristitiam, hæc in petulantiam procedat.” Be that his epitaph, from his old and early friend.)
Sir Isambard Brunel once showed us a stone perforated by an insect, which had suggested to him the horse-shoe form of the Thames Tunnel. On how many of us would such a hint have been utterly wasted! Southey tells us that when Sir Humphrey Davy first ascended Skiddaw with him, he cast his eyes on the fragments of slate with which the ground was strewn, and, stooping to pick one up as he spoke, observed, “I dare say I shall find something here.” The next moment he exclaimed with delight, “I have found something indeed! Here is a substance which has been lately discovered in Saxony, and has not been recognised elsewhere till now!” It was the chiastolite.
I can scarcely form a pleasanter mental picture, than of a young girl, healthy, talented, energetic, sweet-tempered, and with no burthen of self-consciousness or morbid feeling, tired, but not too tired, after her day’s toil as governess to a tolerably docile set of young pupils (and all children may be trained to docility), and resting body and mind on a comfortable sofa in a cheerful room, with an entertaining book which interests her; or now and then drawn off from it by pleasing thoughts of home, and of the appreciation which there overpays her labours. And such a picture do I form of Emily Prout.