Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/114

106 She walked straight to the most lonely part at the back of the house, and sat down in a little ruined arbour to think what she should do. She had not been there long, when she saw, lying right before her on the path, another straightened hair-pin!

She stooped to raise it, trembling as she did so. As she rose, holding it in her fingers, a dark form passed between her and the sun, casting a cold shadow upon her, and looking up, she read in Silas’s white face the certainty that he knew her thought. Then, with a shriek—

Days, and weeks, and months passed by, and Hester’s wits still wandered. Her good Aunt Sophy brought her up to town, and change of scene at length restored her to her former health.

After having married, and survived her husband, Mrs. Haddock became the laundress in this gloomy old house, where now she sits telling us the story.

And Mr. Silas. What of him? He is the owner of the Pollards now, and of a large house in town, and has many servants. Mrs. Haddock could tell you strange stories of wild orgies, gambling, drunkenness, and debauchery in which, they say, he spent some twenty years. But that is over; and for these ten years past, he has lain bed-ridden. Without friend or relation, with no one to care for him or attend to him, save his hired nurses—dragging on a wretched existence from day to day, with nothing to live for, yet afraid to die; paralysed, helpless, unutterably lonely and miserable, old Silas Gurdlestone awaits the dread summons calling him to the tribunal before which he must render an account of his deeds. God be merciful to him! 2em

the various changes which have passed upon our social habits within the last halfcentury, there are none which astonish us more, on looking back, than those which belong to our modes of travelling. That men must occasionally travel in the way of their business, must pass from market to market, or from town to town, and sometimes even from one country to another, has long been recognised as a necessity of their modes of existence; but with women the case was formerly very different, and once in a life time to have seen the metropolis of their own country, was to respectable women of the middle ranks of society residing in the northern or midland counties of England, about as much as their locomotive propensities aspired to; while to visit the lake districts of Westmoreland and Cumberland was a romance reserved for that culminating point of happiness—the wedding tour.

The wonder is now what the dear, restless souls actually did with themselves when home became a little dull, and they wanted to be off somewhere, and the kind physician of the family thought a little change would do them good, and they thought so too.

Pondering upon this question the other day, and stretching my thoughts backward into the past, scarcely even so far as to half a century, I was forcibly and somewhat amusingly reminded of that now forgotten, though once important, accessory to locomotion—the pillion. I thought