But my father, with his broad hat over his brows, was in deep thought. The scenes of his youth were rising before him, and his memory went, smooth as a spirit's wing, over delve and bump. And my mother, who sat next him, had her arm on his shoulder, and was watching his face jealously. Did she think that in that thoughtful face there was regret for the old love? Blanche, who had been very sad, and had wept much and quietly since they put on her the mourning, and told her that she had no brother (though she had no remembrance of the lost), began now to evince infantine curiosity and eagerness to catch the first peep of her father's beloved tower. And Blanche sat on my knee, and I shared her impatience. At last there came in view a church-spire, a church, a plain square building near it, the parsonage (my father's old home), a long, straggling street of cottages and rude shops, with a better kind of house here and there, and in the hinder ground a gray, deformed mass of wall and ruin, placed on one of those eminences on which the Danes loved to pitch camp or build fort, with one high, rude, Anglo-Norman tower rising from the midst. Few trees were round it, and those either poplars or firs, save, as we approached, one mighty oak,—integral and unscathed. The road now wound behind the parsonage and up a steep ascent. Such a road,—the whole parish ought to have been flogged for it! If I had sent up a road like that, even on a map, to Dr. Herman, I should not have sat down in comfort for a week to come!
The fly-coach came to a full stop.
"Let us get out," cried I, opening the door, and springing to the ground to set the example.
Blanche followed, and my respected parents came next. But when Mrs.
Primmins was about to heave herself into movement,
"Papce!" said my father. "I think, Mrs. Primmins, you must remain in, to keep the books steady."
"Lord love you!" cried Mrs. Primmins, aghast.
"The subtraction of such a mass, or moles,—supple and elastic as all flesh is, and fitting into the hard corners of the inert matter,—such a subtraction, Mrs. Primmins, would leave a vacuum which no natural system, certainly no artificial organization, could sustain. There would be a regular dance of atoms, Mrs. Primmins; my books would fly here, there, on the floor, out of the window!
"'Corporis officium est quoniam omnia deorsum.'
"The business of a body like yours, Mrs. Primmins, is to press all things down, to keep them tight, as you will know one of these days,—that is, if you will do me the favor to read Lucretius, and master that material philosophy of which I may say, without flattery, my dear Mrs. Primmins, that you are a living illustration."
These, the first words my father had spoken since we set out from the inn, seemed to assure my mother that she need have no apprehension as to the character of his thoughts, for her brow cleared, and she said, laughing,—