"The Story of our Lives from Year to Year." - SHAKESPEARE. 70631 ALL THE YEAR ROUND. A Weekly Journal. CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS. WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED HOUSEHOLD WORDS. NEW SERIES. VOLUME XXVI. FROM OCTOBER 23, 1880, TO MARCH 26, 1881. LONDON: PUBLISHED AT 26, WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND. 1881. Granada, Pottery in an Ancient Concerning Names 463, 493 Cairn in 392 209 Grapes, Gathering the, for Wine 90 Normandy Peasantry 32, 133, 181, 271 Northern Holy Grass, The. 129 ALL THE No. 621. NEW SERIES. YEAR ROUND A Weekly Journal CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED HOUSEHOLD WORDS" SATURDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1880. ASPHODEL. BY THE AUTHOR OF "VIXEN," "LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," ETC. CHAPTER XIII. "AFTER MY MIGHT FUL FAYNE WOLD I YOU PLESE." THE day after the family dinner was hopelessly wet; so the expedition to Shottery, proposed by Edgar Turchill and seconded by Daphne, was indefinitely postponed. The summer fleeted by, the beautiful bounteous summer, with her lap full of sweetscented flowers; the corn grew tall, the hay was being carted in many a meadow within sound of Stratford bells; and the woods began to put on that look of dull uniform green, which indicates the beginning of the end. For the sisters at South Hill, for Gerald Goring and Edgar Turchill, July and August had been one long holiday. There was so little in life for these young people to do except take their pleasure. Theirs was an existence of perpetual rose-gathering; and the roses of life budded and bloomed for them with an inexhaustible fertility. Perhaps Madoline was the only one among them who had any idea of duty. Edgar was an affectionate son, a good master, and a liberal landlord; but he had never been called upon to sacrifice his own inclinations for the welfare of others, and he had never given his mind to any of the graver questions of the day. To him it mattered very little how the labouring classes as a body were taught and housed; so long as the peasants on his own land had decent cottages, and were strangers to want. It irked him not whether the mass of mankind were Jews or Gentiles, ritualists, dissenters, or rank unbelievers; so long as he sat in the old cloth-lined family pew on Sunday morning, VOL. XXVI, PRICE TWOPENCE. assisting at the same service which had been all-sufficient for his father, and seeing his dependents deporting themselves discreetly in their places in the gallery. His life was a narrow life, travelling in a narrow path that had been worn for him by the footsteps of his ancestors. He was a good man, in a limited way. But he had never read the modern gospel, according to Thomas Carlyle, which after all is but an expansion of the parable of the talents; and he knew not that every man must work after some fashion or other, and do something for the time in which he lives. He was so thoroughly honest and true-hearted, that, if the narrowness and uselessness of his life had been revealed to him, he would assuredly have girded his loins and taken up the pilgrim's staff. Never having had any such revelation he took his pleasure as innocently as a school-boy at home for the holidays, and had no idea that he was open to the same reproach which that man received who had buried the wealth entrusted to him. He was as near happiness in this bright summer-tide as a mortal can hope to be. The greater part of his days were spent with Daphne, and Daphne was always delightful. True that she was changeable as the light July winds, and that there were times when she most unmercifully snubbed him. But to be snubbed by her was better than the smiles and blandishments of other women. She was given to that coyness and skittishness, the grata protervitas, which seems to have been the chief fascination of the professional beauty of the Augustan era. She was coy as Chloe; coquettish as Glycera; fickle as Lydia, who, supposing there was only one lady of that name, and she a real personage, was rather too bad. Daphne was half-a-dozen girls in 621 |