[CHAPTER XXV.]
HIGH AND LOW BEECH.
THE families at High and Low Beech continued to prosper, after a fashion; that is to say, they worked hard, lived frugally for the most part, and made some money.
Matthew Wilson was an old man now. He was not young when we first made his acquaintance, and add twenty years or more to fifty and a little over, and we arrive at the threescore and ten, or going on for fourscore, in which not much remains of the human life.
Not that Matthew thought much of this. He was strong and hearty, he said. His teeth were sound, some of them at any rate; and he could stump about his farm as well, pretty near, as he had done any time in the last ten years. He was not made of such stuff as the young people of modern days; he was born before nerves came in fashion; he hadn't given in to bad habits like some—not he. He didn't go to public-houses as his brother Mark had done; and he didn't go about with a dirty pipe in his mouth all day long, as some others did that he could name, but he wouldn't. And about that nasty tobacco, it was his opinion that it was taking all the manliness out of people nowadays. Look at horses, they never smoked; the same with cows and sheep; and even hogs, though they did sometimes run about with straws in their mouths—but that was only when rough weather was coming—they didn't set a light to the ends and smoke them. They were a deal too knowing for that.
All this, or something very much like it, and a great deal more of the same sort, Matthew Wilson was in the habit of gravely going over with any old crony whom he could get to listen to him. And lacking this, he could propound it at his own fireside on a winter's evening, his wife and his daughter being now his principal listeners there.
For his sons had, years before, all flitted from under the parental roof-tree. George, the next oldest to Walter, was, as our readers may remember, married some twenty years before, and had settled on poor Mark's late holding at High Beech. There he still remained, with a large family growing up around him; but holding no intercourse (or very little, and that not of the pleasantest complexion) with his father and other members of his family. The truth is, George was charged, with how much or how little truth it does not concern us to know, with having, in some family dealings, been too sharp by half.
Now, Matthew liked sharpness well enough in general, and was always sufficiently disposed to sneer at and run down any one who, in his opinion, was deficient in that admirable qualification for getting on in the world, according to his view. But it is one thing to admire sharpness when practised on Number Two, and quite another thing to approve of it when it is brought home to Number One. And so, having been outwitted, as he imagined, by his son George, Matthew Wilson was too much in the habit of pouring out vials of wrath when the occupant of High Beech was mentioned.
"Brother Mark was bad enough," said the old farmer; "and I lost a good five hundred by him; but I don't know if George isn't the worse of the two—and he, my own boy."