Page:The Poems and Prose remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, volume 1 (1869).djvu/21

Rh wanted to look out and see if visitors were coming. We were not fond of visitors, and generally used to run off to our nursery at sight of them, but our mother would not let us peep this time; we must attend to our lessons, she said; she was sure it was only a negro man with a message. And then the door opened and our father was in the room, catching up our mother in his arms, for she was nearly fainting, while we skipped about for joy, and shouted to our mother that she had called our father a negro man. Then came the unpacking of trunks, and all the presents sent to us by our relations in England, and the news of our brother Charles.

'After my father's return it was a very happy time for Arthur. He still went on reading history and poetry with our mother. About this time, I believe, he read with her some of Robertson's and the struggle in the Netherlands in Watson's  also the lives of Columbus, Cortez, and Pizarro. He used also to say the Latin grammar to my father in the early morning, and do sums in the office, lying on the pieces of cotton bagging which were waiting there to be made into sacks for cotton. Here, too, we used to play and tumble about upon the cotton heaps. One of our games was playing at the Swiss Family Robinson, in which I remember Arthur was always Ernest, because Ernest liked reading and knew so much. In hot weather, Arthur used to lie on his bed in the afternoon, reading the "Universal Traveller" and "Captain Cook's Travels," in the purchase of which he had one day expended all his savings. They were both full of pictures, and he used to tell us that he dreamt of the places he had been reading about. He also used to go out with my father when he had business to do on the wharves and on board the ships, and sat with him and my mother in the evenings and saw the occasional visitors who came in, such as the captains of the merchantmen with whom he had dealings, and heard their stories.