Alongside the
extracts he copies in the very perfection of handwriting extracts from
Mede (the only man, according to Theobald, who really understood the
Book of Revelation), Patrick, and other old divines. He works steadily
at this for half an hour every morning during many years, and the
result is doubtless valuable. After some years have gone by he hears
his children their lessons, and the daily oft-repeated screams that
issue from the study during the lesson hours tell their own horrible
story over the house. He has also taken to collecting a hortus siccus,
and through the interest of his father was once mentioned in the
Saturday Magazine as having been the first to find a plant, whose name
I have forgotten, in the neighbourhood of Battersby. This number of
the Saturday Magazine has been bound in red morocco, and is kept
upon the drawing-room table. He potters about his garden; if he
hears a hen cackling he runs and tells Christina, and straightway goes
hunting for the egg.
When the two Miss Allabys came, as they sometimes did, to stay
with Christina, they said the life led by their sister and
brother-in-law was an idyll. Happy indeed was Christina in her choice-
for that she had had a choice was a fiction which soon took root among
them- and happy Theobald in his Christina.
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