They numbered scarce eight summers when a name
Rose on their souls and stirred such motions there
As thrill the buds and shape their hidden frame
At penetration of the quickening air:
His name who told of loyal Evan Dhu,
Of quaint Bradwardine, and Vich Ian Vor,
Making the little world their childhood knew
Large with a land of mountain lake and scaur,
And larger yet with wonder love belief
Toward Walter Scott who living far away
Sent them this wealth of joy and noble grief.
The book and they must part, but day by day,
In lines that thwart like portly spiders ran
They wrote the tale, from Tully Veolan.
The evening that Fred Vincy walked to Lowick parsonage (he had begun to
see that this was a world in which even a spirited young man must
sometimes walk for want of a horse to carry him) he set out at five
o'clock and called on Mrs. Garth by the way, wishing to assure himself
that she accepted their new relations willingly.
He found the family group, dogs and cats included, under the great
apple-tree in the orchard. It was a festival with Mrs. Garth, for her
eldest son, Christy, her peculiar joy and pride, had come home for a
short holiday--Christy, who held it the most desirable thing in the
world to be a tutor, to study all literatures and be a regenerate
Porson, and who was an incorporate criticism on poor Fred, a sort of
object-lesson given to him by the educational mother. Christy himself,
a square-browed, broad-shouldered masculine edition of his mother not
much higher than Fred's shoulder--which made it the harder that he
should be held superior--was always as simple as possible, and thought
no more of Fred's disinclination to scholarship than of a giraffe's,
wishing that he himself were more of the same height. He was lying on
the ground now by his mother's chair, with his straw hat laid flat over
his eyes, while Jim on the other side was reading aloud from that
beloved writer who has made a chief part in the happiness of many young
lives. The volume was "Ivanhoe," and Jim was in the great archery
scene at the tournament, but suffered much interruption from Ben, who
had fetched his own old bow and arrows, and was making himself
dreadfully disagreeable, Letty thought, by begging all present to
observe his random shots, which no one wished to do except Brownie, the
active-minded but probably shallow mongrel, while the grizzled
Newfoundland lying in the sun looked on with the dull-eyed neutrality
of extreme old age. Letty herself, showing as to her mouth and
pinafore some slight signs that she had been assisting at the gathering
of the cherries which stood in a coral-heap on the tea-table, was now
seated on the grass, listening open-eyed to the reading.