I rode home on a horse my host lent me; and Lord Castleton rode part of the way with me, accompanied by his two boys, who bestrode manfully their Shetland ponies and cantered on before us. I paid some compliment to the spirit and intelligence of these children,—a compliment they well deserved.
“Why, yes,” said the marquis, with a father’s becoming pride, “I hope neither of them will shame his grandsire, Trevanion. Albert (though not quite the wonder poor Lady Ulverstone declares him to be) is rather too precocious, and it is all I can do to prevent his being spoilt by flattery to his cleverness, which, I think, is much worse than even flattery to rank,—a danger to which, despite Albert’s destined inheritance, the elder brother is more exposed. Eton soon takes out the conceit of the latter and more vulgar kind. I remember Lord—(you know what an unpretending, good-natured fellow he is now) strutting into the play-ground, a raw boy, with his chin up in the air, and burly Dick Johnson (rather a tuft-hunter now, I’m afraid) coming up and saying, ‘Well, sir, and who the deuce are you?’ ‘Lord ——,’ says the poor devil unconsciously, ‘eldest son of the Marquis of ——.’
“‘Oh, indeed!’ cries Johnson; ‘then there’s one kick for my lord, and two for the marquis!’ I am not fond of kicking, but I doubt if anything ever did—more good than those three kicks. But,” continued Lord Castleton, “when one flatters a boy for his cleverness, even Eton itself cannot kick the conceit out of him. Let him be last in the form, and the greatest dunce ever flogged, there are always people to say that your public schools don’t do for your great geniuses. And it is ten to one but what the father is plagued into taking the boy home and giving him a private tutor, who fixes him into a prig forever. A coxcomb in dress,” said the marquis, smiling, “is a trifler it would ill become me to condemn, and I own that I would rather see a youth a fop than a sloven; but a coxcomb in ideas—why, the younger he is, the more unnatural and disagreeable. Now, Albert, over that hedge, sir.”
“That hedge, papa? The pony will never do it.”
“Then,” said Lord Castleton, taking off his hat with politeness. “I fear you will deprive us of the pleasure of your company.”
The boy laughed, and made gallantly for the hedge, though I saw by his change of color that it a little alarmed him. The pony could not clear the hedge, but it was a pony of tact and resources, and it scrambled through like a cat, inflicting sundry rents and tears on a jacket of Raphael blue.
Lord Castleton said, smiling, “You see, I teach them to get through a difficulty one way or the other. Between you and me,” he added seriously, “I perceive a very different world rising round the next generation from that in which I first went forth and took my pleasure. I shall rear my boys accordingly. Rich noblemen must nowadays be useful men; and if they can’t leap over briers, they must scramble through them. Don’t you agree with me?”
“Yes, heartily.”
“Marriage makes a man much wiser,” said the marquis, after a pause. “I smile now to think how often I sighed at the thought of growing old. Now I reconcile myself to the gray hairs without dreams of a wig, and enjoy youth still; for,” pointing to his sons, “it is there!”
“He has very nearly found out the secret of the saffron bag now,” said my father, pleased and rubbing his hands, when I repeated this talk with Lord Castleton. “But I fear poor Trevanion,” he added, with a compassionate change of countenance, “is still far away from the sense of Lord Bacon’s receipt. And his wife, you say, out of very love for him, keeps always drawing discord from the one jarring wire.”
“You must talk to her, sir.”
“I will,” said my father, angrily, “and scold her too, foolish woman! I shall tell her Luther’s advice to the Prince of Anhalt.”
“What was that, sir?”
“Only to throw a baby into the River Maldon because it had sucked dry five wet-nurses besides the mother, and must therefore be a changeling. Why, that ambition of hers would suck dry all the mother’s milk in the genus mammalian. And such a withered, rickety, malign little changeling too! She shall fling it into the river, by all that is holy!” cried my father; and, suiting the action to the word, away into the pond went the spectacles he had been rubbing indignantly for the last three minutes. “Papae!” faltered my father, aghast, while the Cyprinidae, mistaking the dip of the spectacles for an invitation to dinner, came scudding up to the bank. “It is all your fault,” said Mr. Caxton, recovering himself. “Get me the new tortoise-shell spectacles and a large slice of bread. You see that when fish are reduced to a pond they recognize a benefactor, which they never do when rising at flies or groping for worms in the waste world of a river. Hem!—a hint for the Ulverstones. Besides the bread and the spectacles, just look out and bring me the old black-letter copy of Saint Anthony’s ‘Sermon to Fishes.’”
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