Tra la la la la la!”
“Up with it, young ones; up with the burden though it do come before it’s time,” says the merry voice of your host. And certainly they take him at his word, until the thrushes and blackbirds start singing, too—in self-defence.
“Shall we visit the menagerie now?” queries Master More, when there comes a moment’s silence in the wake of the “good-morrows” which greeted your appearance. “Nay,” as you look round the groups for an explanation, “these be not the only wild animals we keep in the enclosure.”
And then you look again, and see that everybody has some feeding stuff in his or her hand, and you find yourself presently engaged on a round of visits to the quaintest and most varied collection of pet-animals you ever dreamed of. There is one condition laid down in this household for all who would own a pet in it, and that is that the whole care of it devolves on the owner. Methinks in this there is a fine training in thoughtfulness and in the sense of responsibility as well as in Natural History.
There is a little time to spare yet, it seems, before the bell rings for Mass, and you willingly accept the invitation to pass it in the study in the new building. “And Meg shall come with us, too,” your host promises, “but for the others, I would ask no four walls to try and hold them while they be in such spirits.”
So off they go scampering round the garden, the wild young things!
In the new building you find a long gallery lined with books, which leads to a charming little room built all for study and retirement. On the broad oak table lie leaves of the manuscript which has occupied Master More during long hours while all the world beside slept. “Oh! Father,” says Margaret reproachfully, “what a state your desk is in,” and, thereupon, she sets about tidying it with deft hands, and an understanding mind.
“Our Meg here,” says her father, laying a hand on her bonny brown head, “is the only one of her sex one can trust among one’s books and papers, with the hope of finding one’s way safely through them after her. She is the tidy part of my own soul.”
“A part of his own soul!” Nobody shall know until the end has come on earth how true are these words; what tender, holy secrets are confided to this dear daughter alone in all the world; how much apart he lives, even in the midst of that gay and happy family life, in some respects, from all but her! But here as you note her flitting among his books, finding out those which she feels he will need for this work, looking up references and marking passages, you see how closely she is identified with his intellectual interests. Here in this little study she is as much at home as he. And in what lies beyond it, in the little bare room where only a carved crucifix breaks the white line of wall, and where her father seeks God and his own soul in solitude, what is her place? Oh! truly a privileged one there, too—as the world shall know at last when he shall have made the last distribution of his gifts from the Tower—and to her falls his hair-shirt, while Cecily has his “handkerchief,” and Elizabeth “a picture in parchment with her name on the back thereof.”