The farm-house had two rooms looking upon the spot where most of our tale has passed.
The smaller one of these was a little state parlor, seldom used by the family. Here on a table was a grand old folio Bible; the names, births, and deaths of a century of Fieldings appeared in rusty ink and various handwritings upon its fly-leaf.
Framed on the walls were the first savage attempts of woman at worsted-work in these islands. There were two moral commonplaces, and there was the forbidden fruit-tree, whose branches diverged, at set distances like the radii of a circle, from its stem, a perpendicular line; exactly at the end of each branch hung one forbidden fruit—pre-Raphaelite worsted-work.
There were also two prints of more modern date, one agricultural, one manufactural.
No. 1 was a great show of farming implements at Doncaster.
No. 2 showed how, one day in the history of man and of mutton, a sheep was sheared, her wool washed, teased, carded, etc., and the cloth *'d and *'d and *'d and *'d, and a coat shaped and sewed and buttoned upon a goose, whose preparations for inebriating the performers and spectators of his feat appeared in a prominent part of the picture.
The window of this sunny little room was open and on the sill was a row of flower-pots from which a sweet fresh smell crept with the passing air into the chamber.
Behind these flower-pots for two hours past had crouched—all eye and ear and mind—a keen old man.
To Isaac Levi age had brought vast experience, and had not yet dimmed any one of his senses. More than forty-five years ago he had been brought to see that men seldom act or speak so as to influence the fortunes of others without some motive of their own; and that these motives are seldom the motives they advance; and that their real motives are not always known to themselves, and yet can nearly always be read and weighed by an intelligent bystander.
So for near half a century Isaac Levi had read that marvelous page of nature written on black, white and red parchments, and called “Man.”