"You are young, sir, thus to philosophize, and must have seen and experienced more than your years would indicate."
"Some, sir, in an incident see all of its characters that the world in a lifetime may present. They suffer, and they enjoy with an acuteness unknown to most natures; and in youth gain the experiences and knowledge they impart, while most of the world forget the pain and the pleasure of an incident with its evanescence. With such, experience teaches nothing. These progress in the world blindly and are always stumbling and falling."
"The ladies have retired—shall we imitate their example, sir? This will light you to your chamber; good night."
Alone, and kindly shielded with the darkness, the adventurer lay thoughtful and sleepless. Here are two strange beings. There is in the one angelic beauty animated with a soul of giant proportions, large in love, large in hate, and grandly large in its aspirations; and yet it is chained to a rock with fetters that chafe at every motion. The other cold, emotionless, with a reserved severity of manner, which is the offspring of a heart as malignant and sinister as Satan himself may boast of. They hate each other, but how different that hatred! The one is an emotion fierce and fiery but without malice; the other malicious and revengeful. One is the hatred of the recipient of an injury who can forgive; the other the hatred of one who has inflicted an injury with calculation. Such never forgive. And this I am sure is the relation of this brother and sister. Deprived when yet young of the fostering care of a mother, scarcely remembering her father, she has been the ward of this cold, hard being, whose pleasure it has been to thwart every wish of this lovely being: to hate her because she is lovely, and to aggravate into fury her resentments, and to sour every generous impulse of her extraordinary nature. What a curse to have so sensitive a being subjected to the training of so cold and malignant a one!
There is no natural affection. The heart is born a waste: its loves, its hates are of education and association; and the responsibility for the future of a child rests altogether with those intrusted with its rearing and training. The susceptibilities only are born with the heart, and these may be cultivated to good or evil, as imperceptibly as the light permeates the atmosphere. These capacities or susceptibilities are acute or obtuse as the cranium's form will indicate, and require a system suited to each. Attention soon teaches this: the one grows and expands beautifully with the slightest attention; the other is a fat soil, and will run to weeds, without constant, close, and deep cultivation, and its production of good fruit is in exact proportion with its fertility and care. It gives the most trouble but it yields the greatest product. And here in that warm, impulsive heart is the fat soil. O! for the hand to weed away all that is noxious now rooting there. That look, that whispered bitterness was the fruit of wicked wrong—I know it; the very nature prompting there would give the sweetest return to justice, kindness, and love.
THE ROMANCE CONTINUED.
Father Confessor—Open Confession—The Unread Will—Old Toney's Narrative—Squirrel Shooting—The Farewell Unsaid—Brothers-In-Law— Farewell Indeed.
When the morrow came, the clouds were weeping and the damp was dripping from every leaf, and gloomy rifts of spongy vapor floated lazily upon the breeze, promising a wet and very unpleasant day. These misty periods rarely endure many hours in the autumn, but sometimes they continue for days. The atmosphere seems half water, and its warm damp compels close-housing, to avoid the clammy, sickly feeling met beyond the portals. At such times, time hangs heavily, and every resource sometimes fails to dispel the gloom and ennui consequent upon the weather; conversation will pall; music cease to delight, and reading weary. To stand and watch the rain through the window-panes, to lounge from the drawing-room to your chamber, to drum with your fingers upon the table—to beat your brain for a thought which you vainly seek to weave into rhyme in praise of your inamorata—all is unavailing. The rain is slow but ceaseless, and the hours are days to the unemployed mind. We hum a tune and whistle to hurry time, but the indicating fingers of the tediously ticking clock seems stationary, and time waits for fair weather. The ladies love their chambers, and sleeping away the laggard hours, do not feel the oppression of a slow, continuous, lazy rain.
The morning has well-nigh passed, and the drawing-room is still untenanted. The judge was busy in his office, looking over papers and accounts, seemingly unconscious of the murky day; perhaps he had purposely left this work for such a day—wise judge—a solitary man, unloving, and unloved; hospitable by freaks, sordid by habit, and mean by nature. Yet he was wise in his way; devoid of sentiment or sympathy as a grind-stone, his wit was as sharp as his heart was cold. Absorbed in himself, the outside world was nothing to him. He had work, gainful work for all weathers, and therefore no feeling for those who suffered from the weather or the world, if it cost him nothing in pence. He was the guardian of his baby sister; but all of her he had in his heart was a care that she should not marry, before he was ready to settle her estate. The interest he felt in her, was his commissions for administering her property with a legitimate gain earned in the use of her money.