"Yes, pa."
Master Harry dresses himself quickly. His breast begins to swell when he has nearly finished, and it swells more and more as he stands at last, a looking at his father: his father standing looking at him, the quiet image of him.
"Please may I"—the spirit of that little creature, and the way he kept his rising tears down!—"please dear pa—may I—kiss Norah before I go?"
"You may, my child."
So he takes Master Harry by his hand, Boots leads the way with the candle, and they come to that other bedroom, where the elderly lady is seated by the bed and poor little Mrs. Harry Walmer, Junior, is fast asleep. There the father lifts the child up to the pillow, and he lays his little face down for an instant by the little warm face of poor unconscious little Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior, and gently draws it to him—a sight so touching to the chamber-maids who are peeping through the door, that one of them calls out, "It's a shame to part 'em!" But the chamber-maid was always, as Boots informs me, a soft-hearted one. Not that there was any harm in that girl. Far from it.
Finally, Boots says, that's all about it. Mr. Walmers drove away in the chaise, having hold of Master Harry's hand. The elderly lady and Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior, that was never to be (she married a Captain long afterwards, and died in India), went off next day. In conclusion, Boots puts it to me whether I hold with him in two opinions: firstly, that there are not many couples on their way to be married who are half as innocent of guile as those two children; secondly, that it would be a jolly good thing for a great many couples on their way to be married, if they could only be stopped in time, and brought back separately.
CHARLES DICKENS.
THE ENTHUSIAST IN ANATOMY.
The youth whom we shall call "Tom"—and nothing but "Tom," was one of those individuals who labor with a fierce, burning anxiety to burst through the trammels imposed upon them by a limited education,—one of those votaries of science, whose energy seems to grow all the more, because it has nothing to feed upon. He was very slightly formed, and had eyes so bright and shining that when one gazed on him, one was inclined to overlook all his other thin, sharply defined features. Never was there a more complete appearance of a clear intelligence in a corporeal form.
The few half-pence which Tom was enabled to save from his scanty earnings at a laborious trade, he regularly expended at the bookstall; and on one occasion was highly delighted at picking up a small book on anatomy. The work was one of those that had long been superseded by more modern and better treatises, and the little plates were as ill and coarsely done as possible. Nevertheless, with him it had not the disadvantage of comparison. He thought it a mine of science yet unexplored, and he suffered his whole soul to be absorbed by it.