CHAPTER VII. THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. "SPIRIT-STIRRING THOMAS CARLYLE has fancifully balanced our Indian Empire against our WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.-Of course his loyal heart heaved the Empire aboon the beam. Descending from Men to Words, which could we Englanders best dispense with our Colonies, or the word HOME?"-E. In the month of September in every year invariably, the Old Man, winsome Lady! with whom thou hast thus far borne, was wont to abandon Ivy Lodge, and, during the presidency-in-chief of the harvest-moon, to sojourn at the place of his birth: occasionally also in merry May his salutary face was turned thitherwards. Attendant on "these accustomed annual rounds," there were 66 partings" at the Lodge, not by any means "sudden," or of that romantic fervency which a bold poetic figure describes as pressing the heart's life out, but full enough of pathos to dim the Elder's eye. E. accounted for such emotions, and justified what sterner systems of flesh and blood might designate as weakness or effeminacy, by the argument that these autumnal visitations were made in serious rather than in holiday meaning; that Time, with seemingly-increasing celerity, was conducting him into close proximity with that critical withdrawing-gate by which all Earth's human company retire, after visits varying in duration, but by authoritative premonition announced and by accumulating evidence approved to terminate about the threescore-and-tenth year, elude as we may the fatal beck of humankind's gaunt Scene-shifter; and that when, as the ancient of years, he returned to the spot from whence was dated his beginning of days, he moved, though not with heavy heart," as though his steps were tow'rds a tomb," for when his little life should be rounded by its second sleep, it was there, in his own familiar sod, that he desired to be laid down. Of the Elder's feathered dependents two especial favorites, the Queen Dowager and Sir Fred, were chosen to accompany him into country quarters, a measure adopted not so much from E.'s passion for music as to avert their self-inflicted martyrdom in the cause of abstinency-a suicidal zeal in which, or desperate chagrin at his absence, had once nearly reduced them to barebones during an autumnal recess of the rightful Purveyor. The impassive Benjamin was indispensable as compagnon de voyage, so that he also migrated; and while the rural sojourn lasted, the guardianship of the Lodge was delegated to a trusty old official who first entered the service in the year 10 (eighteen prior centuries understood); and when the pro tem. governor had lent respectful audience to E.'s last iteration of injunctions, de totis rebus et quibusdam aliis, he sustained in his stewardship a burden of responsibility, compared with which Lord Ashburton's was a bagatelle, when he undertook the business of the boundary-question and the ticklish task of pacifying noisy brother Jonathan. A green valley bosoming an old grey temple down in the fertile south of Hants, was the scene whereon E.'s eyes first opened to a world very "unintelligible" to infants and philosophers. A sentiment planted by invisible agency, and fostered by unseen dew that gathers at the dawn of sentiency, stimulates in afterlife, even in the sordid, a complacent regard for the spot of his first unconscious début in the character of Mewler and Puker in a nurse's arms;-relaxing to the risible muscles of the most austere is the reflection, Q |