but she is indigenous here. She knows something which is eating like a canker into her young life—it is more than likely that it is something which she has heard in one of those curtained recesses—and, ultimately, it involves the fate of her whole family. Henceforth her silence must be as that of the grave. There are great dark circles under her eyes; anyone can see what she suffers—and no wonder, when she can't talk! Her mother, with tears in her eyes, begs her to tell what terrible mystery is robbing that young cheek of its bloom and streaking those bright tresses with silver. But she speaks not. Her father fails visibly as he sees the cruel change in his favorite daughter, his bonny Kate. Still she preserves that strange, that unnatural silence. Her brother takes to gambling; her elder sister goes into a decline. She can only look on in dull misery. No one can persuade the suffering young creature to ease her heart of its burden. From this it may be seen that in this topsy-turvy world the nature of the difficulty is directly opposite to that commonly observed in the workaday world. No one can induce her to talk here, while there
The common people are not numerous in the world of the English story-book. They exist principally because they are needed to inhabit the little village near the gray old mansion, which bears the name of the family in the great house. The children of the place are useful to pull their forelocks to the gentlefolks as they pass, while the older people are in demand to furnish district-visiting to the ladies of the gentry, who need some outlet for their energies besides tea-drinking. And what a pleasant institution is district-visiting! How enjoyable to be old blind Sally or Dame Martin or Mrs. Stubbs, the charwoman, and to have the rector's lady or the squire's young daughter walk into your cottage and investigate the cupboards, and talk like a tract, and find fault because the baby's face is dirty!
Tea-drinking is a most important institution in the world of the English story-book. It has been known to bring a dilatory lover to time when everything else had failed. The heroine, in a smart braided frock of French gray, is pouring out tea in the drawing-room, when Sir Noel, with the other men, in hunting pink and splashed with mud, enters and begs for a cup of tea. Need I say that his fate is sealed when he sees her mite of a hand (her gloves are number sevens) flashing among the teacups? It then occurs to him that she is a good sort and will suit him down to the ground, or he suddenly discovers that she is a fine woman, and wonders how she would look at the head of his table.
Reading about the incessant drinking of tea and the eating of thin bread- and-butter will create an appetite second only to that produced by a perusal of the cook-book. What, for instance, will make one hungrier, and is at the same time more provoking, than to read in a woman's novel of the women doing with tea and thin bread-and-butter, or having an early tea-supper, because, forsooth, the men are to dine out that evening? They can just as well have what they want to eat (in a novel) as not. What is to prevent them from having fried sole or broiled salmon, with tartar sauce, or lobster cutlets, or roast pheasant, or a joint of mutton, or, at least, a savory omelet? It is nothing out of the novelist's pocket. A man wouldn't be so economical, especially on paper. He would give us something more substantial than tea and thin bread-and-butter,—a venison pasty or a grilled bone, for instance.
Yes, the story-book world is a queer world, but, withal, a pleasant one—a world of love and youth and Springtime.
"The lilacs and laburnums were in bloom." Easy to believe, with such a beginning, that love is eternal, and that the church door always opens into Paradise, and that everything must come out right in the end.
It is a beautiful world, too, where Springtime is almost perpetual; a
