VII. PAPA AND MAMMA 135

inexhaustible, beyond a certain point or time of enthusiasm, no more to be enjoyed; but it is not so often observed by philosophers that home, healthily organized, is always enjoyable; nay, the sick thrill of pleasure through all the brain and heart with which, after even so much as a month or two of absence, I used to catch the first sight of the ridge of Herne Hill, and watch for every turn of the well-known road and every branch of the familiar trees, was-though not so deep or overwhelming-more intimately and vitally powerful than the brightest passions of joy in strange lands, or even in the unaccustomed scenery of my own. To my mother, her ordinary household cares, her reading with Mary and me, her chance of a chat with Mrs. Gray, and the unperturbed preparation for my father’s return, and for the quiet evening, were more than all the splendours or wonders of the globe between poles and equator.

156. Thus we returned-full of new thoughts, and faithful to the old, to this exulting rest of home in the close of 1833. An unforeseen shadow was in the heaven of its charmed horizon.

Every day at Cornhill, Charles¹ became more delightful and satisfactory to everybody who knew him. How a boy living all day in London could keep so bright a complexion, and so crisply Achillean curls of hair-and all the gay spirit of his Croydon mother-was not easily conceivable; but he became a perfect combination of the sparkle of Jin Vin with the steadiness of Tunstall,² and was untroubled by the charms of any unattainable Margaret, for his master had no daughter; but, as worse chance would have it, a son: so that looking forward to possibilities as a rising apprentice ought, Charles saw that there were none in the house for him beyond the place of cashier, or perhaps only head-clerk. His elder brother, who had taught him to swim by throwing him into Croydon canal,³ was getting on fast as

¹ [See above, p. 90.]

² [Jenkin Vincent and Francis Tunstall, the two apprentices of David Ramsay (father of Margaret) in The Fortunes of Nigel.]

³ [See above, p. 89.]

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