Page:Romance & Reality 2.pdf/212

210 —the sleep, sound from exercise—the waking buoyant with health and the consciousness of necessary toil—the friends to whom our childhood was a delight, because it recalled their own! "I dwell among mine own people:" a whole life of domestic duty, and the happiness which springs from that fulfilment which is of affection, are in those words. Emily might have revolved all this in her own exaggerated feelings, till she had convinced herself that it was her duty to have stayed in her native village and solitary home, but for Lady Mandeville, who, though very willing to make all due allowance for her young companion's depressed spirits during the first ten miles, was not prepared to extend the said allowance to twenty. Our sympathy is never very deep unless founded on our own feelings; we pity, but do not enter into the grief we have never known: and if her Ladyship had expressed her thoughts aloud, they would have taken pretty much this form: "I really cannot see so much to regret in an empty house, a village where there is not a creature to speak to, some old trees and dirty children." Politeness, however, acts the lady's-maid to