Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 127.djvu/622

 times, as much when he was foolish as when he was wise. She would have given him the fullest adhesion of her soul now, and echoed every word he said; but the girls did not. They would have preferred to silence him, and were ashamed of his gentle self-complacency. And yet it was quite true that he felt himself a happier man than Mr. Chester, and higher in the scale of merit though not of fortune; and the calm with which he took this event, which was neither more nor less than ruin to him, was fine in its way.

"But what are we to do, papa?" Cicely ventured to ask him, looking up into his face with big anxious eyes, as he took his last Cup of tea.

"My dear, we must wait and see," he said. "There is no very immediate hurry. Let us see first who is appointed, and what the new rector intends to do."

"But, Mr. St. John, you are a very learned man — and if it is a college living" — suggested Miss Maydew.

"It is my own college too," he said reflectively; "and I suppose I am now one of the oldest members of it. It would not be amiss if they let me stay here the rest of my days. But I never was distinguished. I never was a fellow, or anything. I never could push myself forward. No — we must just wait and see what is going to happen. A few days or a few weeks will make little difference. Compose yourselves, my dears," said Mr. St. John. "I am not very, anxious after all."

"I wonder if he would be anxious if you were all starving," cried Miss Maydew, as the girls walked with her to the station in the evening, "Oh, Cicely, I know I oughtn't to say anything to you about your papa. But if he has not been anxious, others have been anxious for him. Your poor mother! how she slaved to keep everything as it ought to be; and even poor Miss Brown. It did not cost him much to marry her — but it cost her her life."

"Aunt Jane!" cried both the girls indignant.

"Well, my dears! She might have been living now, a respectable single woman, doing her duty, as she was capable of doing; instead of which what must she do but bring a couple of white-faced babies into the world that nobody wanted, and die of it. Yes, she did die of it. You don't understand these things — you are only children. And all because he was what you call kind-hearted, and could not bear to see her cry, forsooth. As if the best of us were not obliged both to cry ourselves and see others cry often enough! But they never thought what they were doing; and the ones to suffer will be you."

" Aunt Jane, you ought not to speak so of papa."

"I know I shouldn't, my dear — and I humbly beg your pardons," said Aunt Jane drying her eyes.

"And we ought not to have left him unprotected," said Cicely with a sigh.

 

 From Blackwood's Magazine.

freshest impressions are most fruitful of pleasant associations, and we shall always be glad that we landed in Holland on our first visit to the Continent. But we can understand how that most interesting country is not half so much appreciated as it deserves to be; nor can we say how we might have found it ourselves, had we visited it after travelling elsewhere. Possibly it might have appeared to us, as to so many other people, dull, flat, and, unprofitable. As it is, although we must confess that a little of it goes comparatively far, for its landscapes are undeniably tame, and the plan of its cities somewhat monotonous, yet we always revisit it with ever-renewed satisfaction. The change thither is complete, and everything that meets the eye refreshingly novel and original. You may even experience something of adventure on the passage, and get your first glimpses at the life of our amphibious neighbours in crossing the seas we have so often disputed with them. For ourselves we were fortunate in that way, though the steamer on which we embarked on our maiden voyage — she hailed from Leith, and was "missing" afterwards, one foul day when she had been sent out overladen — made a singularly tedious passsage of it. We brought up in a fog on some fishing-banks in mid-ocean, and by the light of an outbreak of watery sunshine, found ourselves in the middle of a fleet of Dutch fishing-boats, who traded haddocks with us against bottles of Schiedam. These clumsy wall-sided pinks, with the interminable streamers hanging pendant from the gilded vanes at their mastheads, as they lay rocking lazily among wreaths of aqueous vapour, prepared us to appreciate those 