"I hope you threw him out of the window?" cried Captain Delaware, giving way to a burst of honest indignation.
"Oh dear, no!" answered Burrel, "I saw him depart through the usual aperture, with a degree of coolness and fortitude he did not expect; and after trying another, whom I did kick out, I was soon supplied with the present rascal, who is useful, silent, and circumspect. He cheats me in about the same proportion as the others, or rather less; is so far more honest, that he never pretends to honesty; and I have never yet discovered that he lets any other person cheat me besides himself."
"No very high character, either!" answered Captain Delaware.
"I beg your pardon!" cried Burrel. "Sufficient for a prime minister, and more than sufficient for a member of parliament.--But here we are at the cottage; I wonder if I dare intrude again upon Miss Delaware's presence?"
Captain Delaware made no difficulty, and a few minutes afterwards the whole party were observed--with Blanche hanging upon her brother's arm, and Burrel walking by her side, his handsome head bent down to speak and hear with the more marked attention--walking slowly along the lane under the park wall, till they reached the small door nearest to the mansion. There Burrel raised his hat, and took his leave; and while Miss Delaware and her brother entered the park, he drew up his head, threw wide his shoulders, and, resuming his usual gait, returned to the town.
The person who had observed all this, and who declared positively that she had not walked that way on purpose, reported it all fully to the honest folks of Emberton, who instantly prognosticated a marriage. How desperately they were mistaken, remains to be shown.
Burrel returned to his house, dined without the slightest symptoms of love being discernible in the removed dishes; and ended the day by sleeping as devotedly as if he had been a sworn votary of Somnus, first telling his servant to see that all the fires were put out, as he had not the slightest inclination to be woke from his rest again. A fire on two consecutive nights, however, is not a piece of good fortune that happens to every man; and Burrel, after having slept one third of the round dial undisturbed, woke the next morning, and sat down to breakfast, asking himself, what was to occur next?
Every man must find that there come moments in the dull lapse of life, when---as we feel that nothing can stand still--we are certain that something must happen, however small and trifling in itself, to change the monotonous course in which things are proceeding, and lead us to a new train of events. Did you ever trace the current of a small stream, reader, from its earliest gush out of the green swampy turf, or the little rugged bank, to its confluence with some other water? Do! It is amusing and instructive. At its first burst into existence, you will find it generally rushing on in gay and bounding brightness, fretting at all that opposes its course, and dashing over every obstacle that would retard its progress. Gradually as one obstruction after another meets and impedes its onward flow, slower and more slow becomes its current, till a mere molehill will divert its course, and send it wandering far in the most opposite direction to that which it originally assumed. But, after all, I am stealing an image; for some poet--I forget who--has said something very like it. Nevertheless, I make no apology for the robbery. The illustration suits my purpose, and I take it. Let every man steal as much as he likes; but put it in inverted commas, and it is all according to act of parliament.
It matters not that the thought be old: the figure is fully as appropriate as if it were new; and any one who has watched the progress of a stream, must have said in his own heart--"This is life!"
Well, Burrel, as he sat down to breakfast, had just come to one of those slow spaces in the current of existence, where he felt that some bank, or stone, or molehill, must turn the stream; and, as I have before said, his first thought was, What is to happen next?