88 PRÆTERITA-I

Bridget. All handsome lads and pretty lasses; but Margaret, in early youth, met with some mischance that twisted her spine, and hopelessly deformed her. She was clever, and witty, like her mother; but never of any interest to me, though I gave a kind of brotherly, rather than cousinly, affection to all my Croydon cousins. But I never liked invalids, and don’t to this day; and Margaret used to wear her hair in ringlets, which I couldn’t bear the sight of.

Bridget was a very different creature; a black-eyed, or, with precision, dark hazel-eyed, slim-made, lively girl; a little too sharp in the features to be quite pretty, a little too wiry-jointed to be quite graceful; capricious, and more or less selfish in temper, yet nice enough to be once or twice asked to Perth with us, or to stay for a month or two at Herne Hill; but never attaching herself much to us, neither us to her. I felt her an inconvenience in my nursery arrangements, the nursery having become my child’s study as I grew studious; and she had no mind, or, it might be, no leave, to work with me in the garden.

98. The four boys were all of them good, and steadily active. The eldest, John, with wider business habits than the rest, went soon to push his fortune in Australia, and did so; the second, William, prospered also in London.

The third brother, George, was the best of boys and men, but of small wit. He extremely resembled a rural George the Fourth, with an expansive, healthy, benevolent eagerness of simplicity in his face, greatly bettering him as a type of British character. He went into the business in Market Street, with his father, and both were a great joy to all of us in their affectionateness and truth: neither of them in all their lives ever did a dishonest, unkind, or otherwise faultful thing-but still less a clever one! For the present, I leave them happily filling and driving their cart of quartern loaves in morning round from Market Street.

99. The fourth, and youngest, Charles, was like the lastborn in a fairy tale, ruddy as the boy David,¹ bright of

¹ [1 Samuel xvi. 12.]

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