for either their teaching or example. His
modish freaks were soon over, and left little
impress behind them, except a kind of retrospective
wonderment and comical self-glorification
for his escape from the quicksands of the great
world.

Thenceforth he gave himself up to small
nibblings at art and science, which, if they
placed him on no very lofty peak of knowledge,
at least gave him plenty of busy trifling to fill
up his time withal, and sent him trotting round
to scientific meetings, till he appeared a very
pundit of unfathomable lore to the simple-minded
junta in mob-caps and calashes, that gathered
weekly round his adoring mother's arm-chair.

All these particulars of Godpapa Vance's
younger life I only knew, of course, years after
the date of my first memories of him, when my
childish awe for his small quiet presence, his
uncertain step, and even the faint mingled
perfume of Russia leather and scented snuff which
clung about his clothes— though I never saw
him carry or use a snuff-box— had long worn
away. But even in those first, almost baby
days, his easy politeness, his fluent and excellent
French, his shrewd eye (even without
spectacles) for a pretty or distinguished face,
his hard little chart-like pencil drawings, his
splendid Amati violoncello, and learned array
of telescopes, microscopes, compasses, and
chronometers, all in brass-bound mahogany
cases, seemed to impress me with a sort of hazy
consciousness of his antecedents and his character,
which I vividly remember.

Captain Vance had passed his fortieth year
when he chose him a helpmeet; and when he
did so, and brought her home to take her place
in the grim genteel mansion, and her seat beside
the Nankin tea-service, and her share of the
pool at loo, the Dowager Mrs. Vance, now
grown aged and somewhat fretful, and her
sympathising mob-capped chorus, felt something
very like resentment at the homely choice their
Crichton had made, and expressed their disapproval
in the rather harsh and judicial atmosphere
with which they presently surrounded the bride.
Not very bride-like, I fancy, was she in those
days, dear, bright, cozy, girlish-hearted Aunt
Bella. Her brightness and her girlishess were
all in that large heart of hers; encased in a
triple envelope of comfortable embonpoint,
through which scarce a gleam could get out to
idealise her stodgy little person. For the bride
of old Mrs. Vance's paragon son of forty, was
— fearful to record!— a year or two his senior;
short, stout, and rather swarthy of complexion,
with no taste in dress, no elegant accomplishments,
no high blood, and hardly any money!

I wonder still, as I have often wondered in
old days, whether Godpapa Vance when he
married Aunt Bella— we called her aunt from
sheer affection, and the clinging desire to make
ourselves, as it were, akin with her— I wonder, I
say, whether her husband had really any clear
definite idea of his own transcendent wisdom in
the selection. That he knew she worshipped
him I have no doubt, for those clear little
brown eyes of hers could never have kept in
the secret; but did his precise ledger-like mind
fully conceive with what an angel in the house
he had provided himself for all his time to
come; did he know how she would utterly
efface and forget herself and her claims month
after month, year after year, in rocking the
poor invalid captious mother-in-law into
semi-content with the tender cradle-song of her
blessed good temper, and even be able to hush
up and smooth away the sick woman's querulous
whimperings and pettish accusations against
himself, when the claims of his archaeological, or
astronomical, or entomological friends kept him,
nothing loth, evening after evening away from
her couch; when the gunpowder tea had grown
tasteless to her, and the loo distracting, and
the calashed junta a batch of chatterboxes, and
nothing would do but the poor short swarthy
round-about God-given daughter-in-law to sit
and tend her en permanence, and wear out her
own last years of middle life as a poorly paid
sick-nurse for ever on duty? If Godpapa
Vance foreboded one half of this his bride's
priceless dowry of blessings, or as the light she was
to shed on his own life even to its end, when he
proposed marriage to plain Miss Bella Hammond,
he must have had higher wisdom in him than
all his 'ologies could teach.

In time— but it must have been a weary time
even for Aunt Bella's patience— old Mrs. Vance
left her couch for the family vault, and her son
sold the grim genteel mansion, and went with
Aunt Bella to lead a quite new life somewhere in
one of the midland counties, in the near
neighbourhood of a large cathedral town, where the
advantages (to use the house-agent's phrase) of
pure country air, pleasant society, and good
medical attendance, were all combined. A good
doctor had come to be by this time an important
item in the list of Captain Vance's comforts;
for he had already begun to cosset himself into
the possession of sundry pet ailments, of which
the tender cares wherewith his wife surrounded
him were not likely to make him think the
less. Probably there was little beyond mere
fancy in the whole fabric of suspicious symptoms
of strange disease which his nervous fears were
for ever totting up into a deadly sum total.
He used to keep a diary of them, interspersed
with casual notices of fly-fishing, star-gazing,
and quartette-playing; while the incidental
doses wherewith he continually mortified his
inner man were jotted down in red ink on the
margin of the page; bolus, draught, or potion,
beautifully inscribed in clear round text
characters.

Could eyes profane have peeped into this
diary, bound neatly and curiously in parchment
by his own hands, they would have seen such
passages as the following:

"Thursday, May 6th. Threatenings of head
ache, and strange uneasiness about right knee-
pan, after copying four pages of Donovan's index.
Can it be commencement of white swelling?

"Mem.: To look in Dr. Carver's book for
premonitory symptoms. Set lower drawer of