Alongside the extracts he copies in the very perfection of
hand-writing extracts from Mede (the only man, according to Theobald, who
really understood the Book of Revelation), Patrick, and other old
divines. He works steadily at this for half an hour every morning during
many years, and the result is doubtless valuable. After some years have
gone by he hears his children their lessons, and the daily oft-repeated
screams that issue from the study during the lesson hours tell their own
horrible story over the house. He has also taken to collecting a _hortus
siccus_, and through the interest of his father was once mentioned in the
Saturday Magazine as having been the first to find a plant, whose name I
have forgotten, in the neighbourhood of Battersby. This number of the
Saturday Magazine has been bound in red morocco, and is kept upon the
drawing-room table. He potters about his garden; if he hears a hen
cackling he runs and tells Christina, and straightway goes hunting for
the egg.
When the two Miss Allabys came, as they sometimes did, to stay with
Christina, they said the life led by their sister and brother-in-law was
an idyll. Happy indeed was Christina in her choice, for that she had had
a choice was a fiction which soon took root among them--and happy
Theobald in his Christina.
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