IX. THE FEASTS OF THE VANDALS 409

men of sense and honour, and their wives, though women of gentle and amiable disposition, (Elise, indeed, one of the kindest I ever have known,) spoke of their Spanish labourers and French tenantry, with no idea whatever respecting them but that, except as producers by their labour of money to be spent in Paris, they were cumberers of the ground, gave me the first clue to the real sources of wrong in the social laws of modern Europe; and led me necessarily into the political work which has been the most earnest of my life. But these visits and warnings were not till seven or eight years after the time at present rendered account of, in which, nevertheless, it was already beginning to be, if not a question, at least a marvel with me, that these graceful and gay Andalusians, who played guitars, danced boleros, and fought bulls, should virtually get no good of their own beautiful country but the bunch of grapes or stalk of garlic they frugally dined on; that its precious wine was not for them, still less the money it was sold for; but the one came to crown our Vandalic feasts, and the other furnished our Danish walls with pictures, our Danish gardens with milk and honey, and five noble houses in Paris with the means of beautiful dominance in its Elysian fields.

179. Still more seriously, I was now beginning to contrast the luxury and continual opportunity of my own exulting days, with the poverty, and captivity, or, as it seemed to chance always, fatal issue of any efforts to escape from these, in which my cousins, the only creatures whom I had to care for, beyond my home, were each and all spending, or ending, their laborious youth.

I must briefly resume their histories, though much apart from mine; but if my heart was cold to them, my mind was often sad for them.

By grotesque freak of Fors, both my aunts married a Mr. Richardson-and each left six children, four boys and two girls.

The Perth children were Mary and Jessie, James, John, William, and Andrew; the Croydon children, Margaret and

[Version 0.04: March 2008]