Page:Romance & Reality 2.pdf/82

80 The entrance to Fonthill—that truly cloud-capt palace, so fantastic and so transitory—was by two stupendous doors, which seemed to defy the strength of giants. A black dwarf came, and opened them at a touch: the mighty doors revolved on some small spring. These portals are the seemingly insuperable difficulties and obstacles of life, and the dwarf is the small and insignificant circumstance which enables us to pass through them. A severe shower in the park, which wetted Frank Mandeville to the skin, gave him cold, and in a few weeks reduced the beautiful and delicate child to a skeleton. Half the doctors in London were summoned; Lady Mandeville never stirred from his bedside; when one of them said, "The child is being petted to death;—let him try his native air, run about, and don't let him eat till he is hungry."

His advice was followed. Norville Abbey, uninhabited since the first year of her marriage, was ordered to be prepared. Windows were opened, fires lighted, rooms dusted, the avenues cleared, the shrubbery weeded, with all the celerity of the rich and the wilful. Ah! money is the true Aladdin's lamp; and I have often thought the Bank of England is the