Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/373

Rh significance, sometimes also her own compositions, all of which have a stamp of melancholy. She will modulate, or vary, any one melody or theme, which takes her fancy for the moment, in the sweetest manner for a long time. I have never heard music on the piano, which has so much melody as hers. During these evening hours too, she will sometimes amuse herself by startling Hercules with all kinds of airs, which she gives herself, as well as by enumerating all the silk dresses, splendid shawls, carpets, services, cream-jugs, and sugar-basins, which she will have, if she ever marries; all of which is secretly intended I fear to make him afraid of a wife, who will be so exacting and extravagant in her tastes. Hercules, it is true, looks puzzled sometimes on these occasions, and shakes his great head at the little witch, but—it does not matter; he is not afraid of her, perhaps because he silently suspects, what I know to be the case, that all these silk-dresses, and all these other expensive articles, are not at all a necessity to the soul of their fairy-child, that her taste is simple and noble, and that there is no danger from these faults which she is so fond of exaggerating, since she can see them so plainly herself.

Sometimes all the talking falls to his share, and then he tells us of his friends and his home in the beautiful valleys, of his books and pictures there and of the good and earnest people; of a silk factory which he has established amongst them, and of that which he is intending to do for his work-people, for the schools, and by the establishment of a newspaper for the youthful population of the valleys. I can see that he is wishful to excite an interest in her mind towards