prompt:
Chapter: Mr. and Mrs. Glegg at Home

In order to see Mr. and Mrs. Glegg at home, we must enter the town of
St. Ogg's,--that venerable town with the red fluted roofs and the
broad warehouse gables, where the black ships unlade themselves of
their burthens from the far north, and carry away, in exchange, the
precious inland products, the well-crushed cheese and the soft fleeces
which my refined readers have doubtless become acquainted with through
the medium of the best classic pastorals.

It is one of those old, old towns which impress one as a continuation
and outgrowth of nature, as much as the nests of the bower-birds or
the winding galleries of the white ants; a town which carries the
traces of its long growth and history like a millennial tree, and has
sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low
hill from the time when the Roman legions turned their backs on it
from the camp on the hillside, and the long-haired sea-kings came up
the river and looked with fierce, eager eyes at the fatness of the
land. It is a town "familiar with forgotten years." The shadow of the
Saxon hero-king still walks there fitfully, reviewing the scenes of
his youth and love-time, and is met by the gloomier shadow of the
dreadful heathen Dane, who was stabbed in the midst of his warriors by
the sword of an invisible avenger, and who rises on autumn evenings
like a white mist from his tumulus on the hill, and hovers in the
court of the old hall by the river-side, the spot where he was thus
miraculously slain in the days before the old hall was built. It was
the Normans who began to build that fine old hall, which is, like the
town, telling of the thoughts and hands of widely sundered
generations; but it is all so old that we look with loving pardon at
its inconsistencies, and are well content that they who built the
stone oriel, and they who built the Gothic facade and towers of finest
small brickwork with the trefoil ornament, and the windows and
battlements defined with stone, did not sacreligiously pull down the
ancient half-timbered body with its oak-roofed banqueting-hall.

But older even than this old hall is perhaps the bit of wall now built
into the belfry of the parish church, and said to be a remnant of the
original chapel dedicated to St. Ogg, the patron saint of this ancient
town, of whose history I possess several manuscript versions. I
incline to the briefest, since, if it should not be wholly true, it is
at least likely to contain the least falsehood. "Ogg the son of
Beorl," says my private hagiographer, "was a boatman who gained a
scanty living by ferrying passengers across the river Floss. And it
came to pass, one evening when the winds were high, that there sat
moaning by the brink of the river a woman with a child in her arms;
and she was clad in rags, and had a worn and withered look, and she
craved to be rowed across the river. And the men thereabout questioned
her, and said, 'Wherefore dost thou desire to cross the river? Tarry
till the morning, and take shelter here for the night; so shalt thou
be wise and not foolish.' Still she went on to mourn and crave. But
Ogg the son of Beorl came up and said, 'I will ferry thee across; it
is enough that thy heart needs it.' And he ferried her across. And it
came to pass, when she stepped ashore, that her rags were turned into
robes of flowing white, and her face became bright with exceeding
beauty, and there was a glory around it, so that she shed a light on
the water like the moon in its brightness. And she said, 'Ogg, the son
of Beorl, thou art blessed in that thou didst not question and wrangle
with the heart's need, but wast smitten with pity, and didst
straightway relieve the same. And from henceforth whoso steps into thy
boat shall be in no peril from the storm; and whenever it puts forth
to the rescue, it shall save the lives both of men and beasts.' And
when the floods came, many were saved by reason of that blessing on
the boat. But when Ogg the son of Beorl died, behold, in the parting
of his soul, the boat loosed itself from its moorings, and was floated
with the ebbing tide in great swiftness to the ocean, and was seen no
more. Yet it was witnessed in the floods of aftertime, that at the
coming on of eventide, Ogg the son of Beorl was always seen with his
boat upon the wide-spreading waters, and the Blessed Virgin sat in the
prow, shedding a light around as of the moon in its brightness, so
that the rowers in the gathering darkness took heart and pulled anew."

This legend, one sees, reflects from a far-off time the visitation of
the floods, which, even when they left human life untouched, were
widely fatal to the helpless cattle, and swept as sudden death over
all smaller living things. But the town knew worse troubles even than
the floods,--troubles of the civil wars, when it was a continual
fighting-place, where first Puritans thanked God for the blood of the
Loyalists, and then Loyalists thanked God for the blood of the
Puritans. Many honest citizens lost all their possessions for
conscience' sake in those times, and went forth beggared from their
native town. Doubtless there are many houses standing now on which
those honest citizens turned their backs in sorrow,--quaint-gabled
houses looking on the river, jammed between newer warehouses, and
penetrated by surprising passages, which turn and turn at sharp angles
till they lead you out on a muddy strand overflowed continually by the
rushing tide. Everywhere the brick houses have a mellow look, and in
Mrs. Glegg's day there was no incongruous new-fashioned smartness, no
plate-glass in shop-windows, no fresh stucco-facing or other
fallacious attempt to make fine old red St. Ogg's wear the air of a
town that sprang up yesterday. The shop-windows were small and
unpretending; for the farmers' wives and daughters who came to do
their shopping on market-days were not to be withdrawn from their
regular well-known shops; and the tradesmen had no wares intended for
customers who would go on their way and be seen no more. Ah! even Mrs.
Glegg's day seems far back in the past now, separated from us by
changes that widen the years. War and the rumor of war had then died
out from the minds of men, and if they were ever thought of by the
farmers in drab greatcoats, who shook the grain out of their
sample-bags and buzzed over it in the full market-place, it was as a
state of things that belonged to a past golden age when prices were
high. Surely the time was gone forever when the broad river could
bring up unwelcome ships; Russia was only the place where the linseed
came from,--the more the better,--making grist for the great vertical
millstones with their scythe-like arms, roaring and grinding and
carefully sweeping as if an informing soul were in them. The
Catholics, bad harvests, and the mysterious fluctuations of trade were
the three evils mankind had to fear; even the floods had not been
great of late years. The mind of St. Ogg's did not look extensively
before or after. It inherited a long past without thinking of it, and
had no eyes for the spirits that walk the streets. Since the centuries
when St. Ogg with his boat and the Virgin Mother at the prow had been
seen on the wide water, so many memories had been left behind, and had
gradually vanished like the receding hilltops! And the present time
was like the level plain where men lose their belief in volcanoes and
earthquakes, thinking to-morrow will be as yesterday, and the giant
forces that used to shake the earth are forever laid to sleep. The
days were gone when people could be greatly wrought upon by their
faith, still less change it; the Catholics were formidable because
they would lay hold of government and property, and burn men alive;
not because any sane and honest parishioner of St. Ogg's could be
brought to believe in the Pope. One aged person remembered how a rude
multitude had been swayed when John Wesley preached in the
cattle-market; but for a long while it had not been expected of
preachers that they should shake the souls of men. An occasional burst
of fervor in Dissenting pulpits on the subject of infant baptism was
the only symptom of a zeal unsuited to sober times when men had done
with change. Protestantism sat at ease, unmindful of schisms, careless
of proselytism: Dissent was an inheritance along with a superior pew
and a business connection; and Churchmanship only wondered
contemptuously at Dissent as a foolish habit that clung greatly to
families in the grocery and chandlering lines, though not incompatible
with prosperous wholesale dealing. But with the Catholic Question had
come a slight wind of controversy to break the calm: the elderly
rector had become occasionally historical and argumentative; and Mr.
Spray, the Independent minister, had begun to preach political
sermons, in which he distinguished with much subtlety between his
fervent belief in the right of the Catholics to the franchise and his
fervent belief in their eternal perdition. Most of Mr. Spray's
hearers, however, were incapable of following his subtleties, and many
old-fashioned Dissenters were much pained by his "siding with the
Catholics"; while others thought he had better let politics alone.
Public spirit was not held in high esteem at St. Ogg's, and men who
busied themselves with political questions were regarded with some
suspicion, as dangerous characters; they were usually persons who had
little or no business of their own to manage, or, if they had, were
likely enough to become insolvent.

This was the general aspect of things at St. Ogg's in Mrs. Glegg's
day, and at that particular period in her family history when she had
had her quarrel with Mr. Tulliver. It was a time when ignorance was
much more comfortable than at present, and was received with all the
honors in very good society, without being obliged to dress itself in
an elaborate costume of knowledge; a time when cheap periodicals were
not, and when country surgeons never thought of asking their female
patients if they were fond of reading, but simply took it for granted
that they preferred gossip; a time when ladies in rich silk gowns wore
large pockets, in which they carried a mutton-bone to secure them
against cramp. Mrs. Glegg carried such a bone, which she had inherited
from her grandmother with a brocaded gown that would stand up empty,
like a suit of armor, and a silver-headed walking-stick; for the
Dodson family had been respectable for many generations.

Mrs. Glegg had both a front and a back parlor in her excellent house
at St. Ogg's, so that she had two points of view from which she could
observe the weakness of her fellow-beings, and reinforce her
thankfulness for her own exceptional strength of mind. From her front
window she could look down the Tofton Road, leading out of St. Ogg's,
and note the growing tendency to "gadding about" in the wives of men
not retired from business, together with a practice of wearing woven
cotton stockings, which opened a dreary prospect for the coming
generation; and from her back windows she could look down the pleasant
garden and orchard which stretched to the river, and observe the folly
of Mr. Glegg in spending his time among "them flowers and vegetables."
For Mr. Glegg, having retired from active business as a wool-stapler
for the purpose of enjoying himself through the rest of his life, had
found this last occupation so much more severe than his business, that
he had been driven into amateur hard labor as a dissipation, and
habitually relaxed by doing the work of two ordinary gardeners. The
economizing of a gardener's wages might perhaps have induced Mrs.
Glegg to wink at this folly, if it were possible for a healthy female
mind even to simulate respect for a husband's hobby. But it is well
known that this conjugal complacency belongs only to the weaker
portion of the sex, who are scarcely alive to the responsibilities of
a wife as a constituted check on her husband's pleasures, which are
hardly ever of a rational or commendable kind.

Mr. Glegg on his side, too, had a double source of mental occupation,
which gave every promise of being inexhaustible. On the one hand, he
surprised himself by his discoveries in natural history, finding that
his piece of garden-ground contained wonderful caterpillars, slugs,
and insects, which, so far as he had heard, had never before attracted
human observation; and he noticed remarkable coincidences between
these zoological phenomena and the great events of that time,--as, for
example, that before the burning of York Minster there had been
mysterious serpentine marks on the leaves of the rose-trees, together
with an unusual prevalence of slugs, which he had been puzzled to know
the meaning of, until it flashed upon him with this melancholy
conflagration. (Mr. Glegg had an unusual amount of mental activity,
which, when disengaged from the wool business, naturally made itself a
pathway in other directions.) And his second subject of meditation was
the "contrairiness" of the female mind, as typically exhibited in Mrs.
Glegg. That a creature made--in a genealogical sense--out of a man's
rib, and in this particular case maintained in the highest
respectability without any trouble of her own, should be normally in a
state of contradiction to the blandest propositions and even to the
most accommodating concessions, was a mystery in the scheme of things
to which he had often in vain sought a clew in the early chapters of
Genesis. Mr. Glegg had chosen the eldest Miss Dodson as a handsome
embodiment of female prudence and thrift, and being himself of a
money-getting, money-keeping turn, had calculated on much conjugal
harmony. But in that curious compound, the feminine character, it may
easily happen that the flavor is unpleasant in spite of excellent
ingredients; and a fine systematic stinginess may be accompanied with
a seasoning that quite spoils its relish. Now, good Mr. Glegg himself
was stingy in the most amiable manner; his neighbors called him
"near," which always means that the person in question is a lovable
skinflint. If you expressed a preference for cheese-parings, Mr. Glegg
would remember to save them for you, with a good-natured delight in
gratifying your palate, and he was given to pet all animals which
required no appreciable keep. There was no humbug or hypocrisy about
Mr. Glegg; his eyes would have watered with true feeling over the sale
of a widow's furniture, which a five-pound note from his side pocket
would have prevented; but a donation of five pounds to a person "in a
small way of life" would have seemed to him a mad kind of lavishness
rather than "charity," which had always presented itself to him as a
contribution of small aids, not a neutralizing of misfortune. And Mr.
Glegg was just as fond of saving other people's money as his own; he
would have ridden as far round to avoid a turnpike when his expenses
were to be paid for him, as when they were to come out of his own
pocket, and was quite zealous in trying to induce indifferent
acquaintances to adopt a cheap substitute for blacking. This
inalienable habit of saving, as an end in itself, belonged to the
industrious men of business of a former generation, who made their
fortunes slowly, almost as the tracking of the fox belongs to the
harrier,--it constituted them a "race," which is nearly lost in these
days of rapid money-getting, when lavishness comes close on the back
of want. In old-fashioned times an "independence" was hardly ever made
without a little miserliness as a condition, and you would have found
that quality in every provincial district, combined with characters as
various as the fruits from which we can extract acid. The true
Harpagons were always marked and exceptional characters; not so the
worthy tax-payers, who, having once pinched from real necessity,
retained even in the midst of their comfortable retirement, with their
wallfruit and wine-bins, the habit of regarding life as an ingenious
process of nibbling out one's livelihood without leaving any
perceptible deficit, and who would have been as immediately prompted
to give up a newly taxed luxury when they had had their clear five
hundred a year, as when they had only five hundred pounds of capital.
Mr. Glegg was one of these men, found so impracticable by chancellors
of the exchequer; and knowing this, you will be the better able to
understand why he had not swerved from the conviction that he had made
an eligible marriage, in spite of the too-pungent seasoning that
nature had given to the eldest Miss Dodson's virtues. A man with an
affectionate disposition, who finds a wife to concur with his
fundamental idea of life, easily comes to persuade himself that no
other woman would have suited him so well, and does a little daily
snapping and quarrelling without any sense of alienation. Mr. Glegg,
being of a reflective turn, and no longer occupied with wool, had much
wondering meditation on the peculiar constitution of the female mind
as unfolded to him in his domestic life; and yet he thought Mrs.
Glegg's household ways a model for her sex. It struck him as a
pitiable irregularity in other women if they did not roll up their
table-napkins with the same tightness and emphasis as Mrs. Glegg did,
if their pastry had a less leathery consistence, and their damson
cheese a less venerable hardness than hers; nay, even the peculiar
combination of grocery and druglike odors in Mrs. Glegg's private
cupboard impressed him as the only right thing in the way of cupboard
smells. I am not sure that he would not have longed for the
quarrelling again, if it had ceased for an entire week; and it is
certain that an acquiescent, mild wife would have left his meditations
comparatively jejune and barren of mystery.

Mr. Glegg's unmistakable kind-heartedness was shown in this, that it
pained him more to see his wife at variance with others,--even with
Dolly, the servant,--than to be in a state of cavil with her himself;
and the quarrel between her and Mr. Tulliver vexed him so much that it
quite nullified the pleasure he would otherwise have had in the state
of his early cabbages, as he walked in his garden before breakfast the
next morning. Still, he went in to breakfast with some slight hope
that, now Mrs. Glegg had "slept upon it," her anger might be subdued
enough to give way to her usually strong sense of family decorum. She
had been used to boast that there had never been any of those deadly
quarrels among the Dodsons which had disgraced other families; that no
Dodson had ever been "cut off with a shilling," and no cousin of the
Dodsons disowned; as, indeed, why should they be? For they had no
cousins who had not money out at use, or some houses of their own, at
the very least.

There was one evening-cloud which had always disappeared from Mrs.
Glegg's brow when she sat at the breakfast-table. It was her fuzzy
front of curls; for as she occupied herself in household matters in
the morning it would have been a mere extravagance to put on anything
so superfluous to the making of leathery pastry as a fuzzy curled
front. By half-past ten decorum demanded the front; until then Mrs.
Glegg could economize it, and society would never be any the wiser.
But the absence of that cloud only left it more apparent that the
cloud of severity remained; and Mr. Glegg, perceiving this, as he sat
down to his milkporridge, which it was his old frugal habit to stem
his morning hunger with, prudently resolved to leave the first remark
to Mrs. Glegg, lest, to so delicate an article as a lady's temper, the
slightest touch should do mischief. People who seem to enjoy their ill
temper have a way of keeping it in fine condition by inflicting
privations on themselves. That was Mrs. Glegg's way. She made her tea
weaker than usual this morning, and declined butter. It was a hard
case that a vigorous mood for quarrelling, so highly capable of using
an opportunity, should not meet with a single remark from Mr. Glegg on
which to exercise itself. But by and by it appeared that his silence
would answer the purpose, for he heard himself apostrophized at last
in that tone peculiar to the wife of one's bosom.

"Well, Mr. Glegg! it's a poor return I get for making you the wife
I've made you all these years. If this is the way I'm to be treated,
I'd better ha' known it before my poor father died, and then, when I'd
wanted a home, I should ha' gone elsewhere, as the choice was offered
me."

Mr. Glegg paused from his porridge and looked up, not with any new
amazement, but simply with that quiet, habitual wonder with which we
regard constant mysteries.

"Why, Mrs. G., what have I done now?"

"Done now, Mr. Glegg? _done now?_--I'm sorry for you."

Not seeing his way to any pertinent answer, Mr. Glegg reverted to his
porridge.

"There's husbands in the world," continued Mrs. Glegg, after a pause,
"as 'ud have known how to do something different to siding with
everybody else against their own wives. Perhaps I'm wrong and you can
teach me better. But I've allays heard as it's the husband's place to
stand by the wife, instead o' rejoicing and triumphing when folks
insult her."

"Now, what call have you to say that?" said Mr. Glegg, rather warmly,
for though a kind man, he was not as meek as Moses. "When did I
rejoice or triumph over you?"

"There's ways o' doing things worse than speaking out plain, Mr.
Glegg. I'd sooner you'd tell me to my face as you make light of me,
than try to make out as everybody's in the right but me, and come to
your breakfast in the morning, as I've hardly slept an hour this
night, and sulk at me as if I was the dirt under your feet."

"Sulk at you?" said Mr. Glegg, in a tone of angry facetiousness.
"You're like a tipsy man as thinks everybody's had too much but
himself."

"Don't lower yourself with using coarse language to _me_, Mr. Glegg!
It makes you look very small, though you can't see yourself," said
Mrs. Glegg, in a tone of energetic compassion. "A man in your place
should set an example, and talk more sensible."

"Yes; but will you listen to sense?" retorted Mr. Glegg, sharply. "The
best sense I can talk to you is what I said last night,--as you're i'
the wrong to think o' calling in your money, when it's safe enough if
you'd let it alone, all because of a bit of a tiff, and I was in hopes
you'd ha' altered your mind this morning. But if you'd like to call it
in, don't do it in a hurry now, and breed more enmity in the family,
but wait till there's a pretty mortgage to be had without any trouble.
You'd have to set the lawyer to work now to find an investment, and
make no end o' expense."

Mrs. Glegg felt there was really something in this, but she tossed her
head and emitted a guttural interjection to indicate that her silence
was only an armistice, not a peace. And, in fact hostilities soon
broke out again.

"I'll thank you for my cup o' tea, now, Mrs. G.," said Mr. Glegg,
seeing that she did not proceed to give it him as usual, when he had
finished his porridge. She lifted the teapot with a slight toss of the
head, and said,--

"I'm glad to hear you'll _thank_ me, Mr. Glegg. It's little thanks _I_
get for what I do for folks i' this world. Though there's never a
woman o' _your_ side o' the family, Mr. Glegg, as is fit to stand up
with me, and I'd say it if I was on my dying bed. Not but what I've
allays conducted myself civil to your kin, and there isn't one of 'em
can say the contrary, though my equils they aren't, and nobody shall
make me say it."

"You'd better leave finding fault wi' my kin till you've left off
quarrelling with you own, Mrs. G.," said Mr. Glegg, with angry
sarcasm. "I'll trouble you for the milk-jug."

"That's as false a word as ever you spoke, Mr. Glegg," said the lady,
pouring out the milk with unusual profuseness, as much as to say, if
he wanted milk he should have it with a vengeance. "And you know it's
false. I'm not the woman to quarrel with my own kin; _you_ may, for
I've known you to do it."

"Why, what did you call it yesterday, then, leaving your sister's
house in a tantrum?"

"I'd no quarrel wi' my sister, Mr. Glegg, and it's false to say it.
Mr. Tulliver's none o' my blood, and it was him quarrelled with me,
and drove me out o' the house. But perhaps you'd have had me stay and
be swore at, Mr. Glegg; perhaps you was vexed not to hear more abuse
and foul language poured out upo' your own wife. But, let me tell you,
it's _your_ disgrace."

"Did ever anybody hear the like i' this parish?" said Mr. Glegg,
getting hot. "A woman, with everything provided for her, and allowed
to keep her own money the same as if it was settled on her, and with a
gig new stuffed and lined at no end o' expense, and provided for when
I die beyond anything she could expect--to go on i' this way, biting
and snapping like a mad dog! It's beyond everything, as God A 'mighty
should ha' made women _so_." (These last words were uttered in a tone
of sorrowful agitation. Mr. Glegg pushed his tea from him, and tapped
the table with both his hands.)

"Well, Mr. Glegg, if those are your feelings, it's best they should be
known," said Mrs. Glegg, taking off her napkin, and folding it in an
excited manner. "But if you talk o' my being provided for beyond what
I could expect, I beg leave to tell you as I'd a right to expect a
many things as I don't find. And as to my being like a mad dog, it's
well if you're not cried shame on by the county for your treatment of
me, for it's what I can't bear, and I won't bear----"

Here Mrs. Glegg's voice intimated that she was going to cry, and
breaking off from speech, she rang the bell violently.

"Sally," she said, rising from her chair, and speaking in rather a
choked voice, "light a fire up-stairs, and put the blinds down. Mr.
Glegg, you'll please to order what you'd like for dinner. I shall have
gruel."

Mrs. Glegg walked across the room to the small book-case, and took
down Baxter's "Saints' Everlasting Rest," which she carried with her
up-stairs. It was the book she was accustomed to lay open before her
on special occasions,--on wet Sunday mornings, or when she heard of a
death in the family, or when, as in this case, her quarrel with Mr.
Glegg had been set an octave higher than usual.

But Mrs. Glegg carried something else up-stairs with her, which,
together with the "Saints' Rest" and the gruel, may have had some
influence in gradually calming her feelings, and making it possible
for her to endure existence on the ground-floor, shortly before
tea-time. This was, partly, Mr. Glegg's suggestion that she would do
well to let her five hundred lie still until a good investment turned
up; and, further, his parenthetic hint at his handsome provision for
her in case of his death. Mr. Glegg, like all men of his stamp, was
extremely reticent about his will; and Mrs. Glegg, in her gloomier
moments, had forebodings that, like other husbands of whom she had
heard, he might cherish the mean project of heightening her grief at
his death by leaving her poorly off, in which case she was firmly
resolved that she would have scarcely any weeper on her bonnet, and
would cry no more than if he had been a second husband. But if he had
really shown her any testamentary tenderness, it would be affecting to
think of him, poor man, when he was gone; and even his foolish fuss
about the flowers and garden-stuff, and his insistence on the subject
of snails, would be touching when it was once fairly at an end. To
survive Mr. Glegg, and talk eulogistically of him as a man who might
have his weaknesses, but who had done the right thing by her,
not-withstanding his numerous poor relations; to have sums of interest
coming in more frequently, and secrete it in various corners, baffling
to the most ingenious of thieves (for, to Mrs. Glegg's mind, banks and
strong-boxes would have nullified the pleasure of property; she might
as well have taken her food in capsules); finally, to be looked up to
by her own family and the neighborhood, so as no woman can ever hope
to be who has not the praeterite and present dignity comprised in being
a "widow well left,"--all this made a flattering and conciliatory view
of the future. So that when good Mr. Glegg, restored to good humor by
much hoeing, and moved by the sight of his wife's empty chair, with
her knitting rolled up in the corner, went up-stairs to her, and
observed that the bell had been tolling for poor Mr. Morton, Mrs.
Glegg answered magnanimously, quite as if she had been an uninjured
woman: "Ah! then, there'll be a good business for somebody to take
to."

Baxter had been open at least eight hours by this time, for it was
nearly five o'clock; and if people are to quarrel often, it follows as
a corollary that their quarrels cannot be protracted beyond certain
limits.

Mr. and Mrs. Glegg talked quite amicably about the Tullivers that
evening. Mr. Glegg went the length of admitting that Tulliver was a
sad man for getting into hot water, and was like enough to run through
his property; and Mrs. Glegg, meeting this acknowledgment half-way,
declared that it was beneath her to take notice of such a man's
conduct, and that, for her sister's sake, she would let him keep the
five hundred a while longer, for when she put it out on a mortgage she
should only get four per cent.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: St. Ogg's is "one of those old, old towns which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth of nature." It is named for its patron saint, who was a boatman operating a ferry across the river Floss. It is said that one evening when the winds were high, a woman with a child wished to cross the river, but no one would take her. Ogg took pity on her and ferried her across. When she stepped ashore, "her rags were turned into robes of flowing white," and she blessed Ogg and his boat, so that when floods came he saved many lives. When he died, his boat parted its mooring and floated off to the sea, but ever after when the floods came, he could be seen at evening on the water with the Blessed Virgin in his boat. The old days have been forgotten in St. Ogg's, which "had no eyes for the spirits that walked the streets." Faith is of no importance to anyone, ignorance is "received with all the honours in very good society," and respectability is passed down from one generation to the next. This is the town in which the Gleggs live. Mr. Glegg is a retired wool merchant who now devotes himself to his garden and his meditations on "the 'contrairiness' of the female mind." His wife is his best example of contrariness. He chose her because she was handsome and thrifty, but somehow her stinginess does not complement his own. Mr. Glegg is "a lovable skinflint," but while his wife is also a skinflint, she is less lovable. However, he has convinced himself that "a little daily snapping and quarreling" is not objectionable. Today he is silent at breakfast so that there will be no opportunity to quarrel, "but by-and-by it appeared that his silence would answer the purpose." She scorns him for allowing her to be insulted by Tulliver. He replies that, as he has said before, she is wrong to think of calling in her money, since it will be hard to get as much return on it elsewhere. She tends to agree with this, but continues the argument anyway until Mr. Glegg hints that he has provided for her after his death "beyond anything she could expect." At this Mrs. Glegg retires to her room, apparently still angry, to cherish the thought of being a "widow well left." When Mr. Glegg comes in after his gardening, she is quite cordial, and agrees that she should let Tulliver keep the five hundred a while longer.


prompt:
Chapter: Mr. Tulliver Further Entangles the Skein of Life

Owing to this new adjustment of Mrs. Glegg's thoughts, Mrs. Pullet
found her task of mediation the next day surprisingly easy. Mrs.
Glegg, indeed checked her rather sharply for thinking it would be
necessary to tell her elder sister what was the right mode of behavior
in family matters. Mrs. Pullet's argument, that it would look ill in
the neighborhood if people should have it in their power to say that
there was a quarrel in the family, was particularly offensive. If the
family name never suffered except through Mrs. Glegg, Mrs. Pullet
might lay her head on her pillow in perfect confidence.

"It's not to be expected, I suppose," observed Mrs. Glegg, by way of
winding up the subject, "as I shall go to the mill again before Bessy
comes to see me, or as I shall go and fall down o' my knees to Mr.
Tulliver, and ask his pardon for showing him favors; but I shall bear
no malice, and when Mr. Tulliver speaks civil to me, I'll speak civil
to him. Nobody has any call to tell me what's becoming."

Finding it unnecessary to plead for the Tullivers, it was natural that
aunt Pullet should relax a little in her anxiety for them, and recur
to the annoyance she had suffered yesterday from the offspring of that
apparently ill-fated house. Mrs. Glegg heard a circumstantial
narrative, to which Mr. Pullet's remarkable memory furnished some
items; and while aunt Pullet pitied poor Bessy's bad luck with her
children, and expressed a half-formed project of paying for Maggie's
being sent to a distant boarding-school, which would not prevent her
being so brown, but might tend to subdue some other vices in her, aunt
Glegg blamed Bessy for her weakness, and appealed to all witnesses who
should be living when the Tulliver children had turned out ill, that
she, Mrs. Glegg, had always said how it would be from the very first,
observing that it was wonderful to herself how all her words came
true.

"Then I may call and tell Bessy you'll bear no malice, and everything
be as it was before?" Mrs. Pullet said, just before parting.

"Yes, you may, Sophy," said Mrs. Glegg; "you may tell Mr. Tulliver,
and Bessy too, as I'm not going to behave ill because folks behave ill
to me; I know it's my place, as the eldest, to set an example in every
respect, and I do it. Nobody can say different of me, if they'll keep
to the truth."

Mrs. Glegg being in this state of satisfaction in her own lofty
magnanimity, I leave you to judge what effect was produced on her by
the reception of a short letter from Mr. Tulliver that very evening,
after Mrs. Pullet's departure, informing her that she needn't trouble
her mind about her five hundred pounds, for it should be paid back to
her in the course of the next month at farthest, together with the
interest due thereon until the time of payment. And furthermore, that
Mr. Tulliver had no wish to behave uncivilly to Mrs. Glegg, and she
was welcome to his house whenever she liked to come, but he desired no
favors from her, either for himself or his children.

It was poor Mrs. Tulliver who had hastened this catastrophe, entirely
through that irrepressible hopefulness of hers which led her to expect
that similar causes may at any time produce different results. It had
very often occurred in her experience that Mr. Tulliver had done
something because other people had said he was not able to do it, or
had pitied him for his supposed inability, or in any other way piqued
his pride; still, she thought to-day, if she told him when he came in
to tea that sister Pullet was gone to try and make everything up with
sister Glegg, so that he needn't think about paying in the money, it
would give a cheerful effect to the meal. Mr. Tulliver had never
slackened in his resolve to raise the money, but now he at once
determined to write a letter to Mrs. Glegg, which should cut off all
possibility of mistake. Mrs. Pullet gone to beg and pray for _him_
indeed! Mr. Tulliver did not willingly write a letter, and found the
relation between spoken and written language, briefly known as
spelling, one of the most puzzling things in this puzzling world.
Nevertheless, like all fervid writing, the task was done in less time
than usual, and if the spelling differed from Mrs. Glegg's,--why, she
belonged, like himself, to a generation with whom spelling was a
matter of private judgment.

Mrs. Glegg did not alter her will in consequence of this letter, and
cut off the Tulliver children from their sixth and seventh share in
her thousand pounds; for she had her principles. No one must be able
to say of her when she was dead that she had not divided her money
with perfect fairness among her own kin. In the matter of wills,
personal qualities were subordinate to the great fundamental fact of
blood; and to be determined in the distribution of your property by
caprice, and not make your legacies bear a direct ratio to degrees of
kinship, was a prospective disgrace that would have embittered her
life. This had always been a principle in the Dodson family; it was
one form if that sense of honor and rectitude which was a proud
tradition in such families,--a tradition which has been the salt of
our provincial society.

But though the letter could not shake Mrs. Glegg's principles, it made
the family breach much more difficult to mend; and as to the effect it
produced on Mrs. Glegg's opinion of Mr. Tulliver, she begged to be
understood from that time forth that she had nothing whatever to say
about him; his state of mind, apparently, was too corrupt for her to
contemplate it for a moment. It was not until the evening before Tom
went to school, at the beginning of August, that Mrs. Glegg paid a
visit to her sister Tulliver, sitting in her gig all the while, and
showing her displeasure by markedly abstaining from all advice and
criticism; for, as she observed to her sister Deane, "Bessy must bear
the consequence o' having such a husband, though I'm sorry for her,"
and Mrs. Deane agreed that Bessy was pitiable.

That evening Tom observed to Maggie: "Oh my! Maggie, aunt Glegg's
beginning to come again; I'm glad I'm going to school. _You'll_ catch
it all now!"

Maggie was already so full of sorrow at the thought of Tom's going
away from her, that this playful exultation of his seemed very unkind,
and she cried herself to sleep that night.

Mr. Tulliver's prompt procedure entailed on him further promptitude in
finding the convenient person who was desirous of lending five hundred
pounds on bond. "It must be no client of Wakem's," he said to himself;
and yet at the end of a fortnight it turned out to the contrary; not
because Mr. Tulliver's will was feeble, but because external fact was
stronger. Wakem's client was the only convenient person to be found.
Mr. Tulliver had a destiny as well as OEdipus, and in this case
he might plead, like OEdipus, that his deed was inflicted on him
rather than committed by him.

Book II

_School-Time_

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: "Owing to this new adjustment of Mrs. Glegg's thoughts," Mrs. Pullet finds it easy to convince her that the money should be left with Tulliver. Mrs. Glegg predicts a dim future for the Tulliver family, but she intends "to set an example in every respect." Unfortunately, Mrs. Tulliver, through her "irrepressible hopefulness," has told her husband that "sister Pullet was gone to try and make everything up with sister Glegg, so that he needn't think about paying in the money." Tulliver immediately writes to Mrs. Glegg saying that he will have the money paid by the next month. The letter convinces Mrs. Glegg that Tulliver's "state of mind, apparently, was too corrupt for her to contemplate it for a moment." Tulliver's promptness also leads him, against his resolve, to borrow the money from a client of his old enemy Wakem.


prompt:
Chapter: Tom's "First Half"

Tom Tulliver's sufferings during the first quarter he was at King's
Lorton, under the distinguished care of the Rev. Walter Stelling, were
rather severe. At Mr. Jacob's academy life had not presented itself to
him as a difficult problem; there were plenty of fellows to play with,
and Tom being good at all active games,--fighting especially,--had
that precedence among them which appeared to him inseparable from the
personality of Tom Tulliver. Mr. Jacobs himself, familiarly known as
Old Goggles, from his habit of wearing spectacles, imposed no painful
awe; and if it was the property of snuffy old hypocrites like him to
write like copperplate and surround their signatures with arabesques,
to spell without forethought, and to spout "my name is Norval" without
bungling, Tom, for his part, was glad he was not in danger of those
mean accomplishments. He was not going to be a snuffy schoolmaster,
he, but a substantial man, like his father, who used to go hunting
when he was younger, and rode a capital black mare,--as pretty a bit
of horse-flesh as ever you saw; Tom had heard what her points were a
hundred times. _He_ meant to go hunting too, and to be generally
respected. When people were grown up, he considered, nobody inquired
about their writing and spelling; when he was a man, he should be
master of everything, and do just as he liked. It had been very
difficult for him to reconcile himself to the idea that his
school-time was to be prolonged and that he was not to be brought up
to his father's business, which he had always thought extremely
pleasant; for it was nothing but riding about, giving orders, and
going to market; and he thought that a clergyman would give him a
great many Scripture lessons, and probably make him learn the Gospel
and Epistle on a Sunday, as well as the Collect. But in the absence of
specific information, it was impossible for him to imagine that school
and a schoolmaster would be something entirely different from the
academy of Mr. Jacobs. So, not to be at a deficiency, in case of his
finding genial companions, he had taken care to carry with him a small
box of percussion-caps; not that there was anything particular to be
done with them, but they would serve to impress strange boys with a
sense of his familiarity with guns. Thus poor Tom, though he saw very
clearly through Maggie's illusions, was not without illusions of his
own, which were to be cruelly dissipated by his enlarged experience at
King's Lorton.

He had not been there a fortnight before it was evident to him that
life, complicated not only with the Latin grammar but with a new
standard of English pronunciation, was a very difficult business, made
all the more obscure by a thick mist of bashfulness. Tom, as you have
observed, was never an exception among boys for ease of address; but
the difficulty of enunciating a monosyllable in reply to Mr. or Mrs.
Stelling was so great, that he even dreaded to be asked at table
whether he would have more pudding. As to the percussion-caps, he had
almost resolved, in the bitterness of his heart, that he would throw
them into a neighboring pond; for not only was he the solitary pupil,
but he began even to have a certain scepticism about guns, and a
general sense that his theory of life was undermined. For Mr. Stelling
thought nothing of guns, or horses either, apparently; and yet it was
impossible for Tom to despise Mr. Stelling as he had despised Old
Goggles. If there were anything that was not thoroughly genuine about
Mr. Stelling, it lay quite beyond Tom's power to detect it; it is only
by a wide comparison of facts that the wisest full-grown man can
distinguish well-rolled barrels from mere supernal thunder.

Mr. Stelling was a well-sized, broad-chested man, not yet thirty, with
flaxen hair standing erect, and large lightish-gray eyes, which were
always very wide open; he had a sonorous bass voice, and an air of
defiant self-confidence inclining to brazenness. He had entered on his
career with great vigor, and intended to make a considerable
impression on his fellowmen. The Rev. Walter Stelling was not a man
who would remain among the "inferior clergy" all his life. He had a
true British determination to push his way in the world,--as a
schoolmaster, in the first place, for there were capital masterships
of grammar-schools to be had, and Mr. Stelling meant to have one of
them; but as a preacher also, for he meant always to preach in a
striking manner, so as to have his congregation swelled by admirers
from neighboring parishes, and to produce a great sensation whenever
he took occasional duty for a brother clergyman of minor gifts. The
style of preaching he had chosen was the extemporaneous, which was
held little short of the miraculous in rural parishes like King's
Lorton. Some passages of Massillon and Bourdaloue, which he knew by
heart, were really very effective when rolled out in Mr. Stelling's
deepest tones; but as comparatively feeble appeals of his own were
delivered in the same loud and impressive manner, they were often
thought quite as striking by his hearers. Mr. Stelling's doctrine was
of no particular school; if anything, it had a tinge of
evangelicalism, for that was "the telling thing" just then in the
diocese to which King's Lorton belonged. In short, Mr. Stelling was a
man who meant to rise in his profession, and to rise by merit,
clearly, since he had no interest beyond what might be promised by a
problematic relationship to a great lawyer who had not yet become Lord
Chancellor. A clergyman who has such vigorous intentions naturally
gets a little into debt at starting; it is not to be expected that he
will live in the meagre style of a man who means to be a poor curate
all his life; and if the few hundreds Mr. Timpson advanced toward his
daughter's fortune did not suffice for the purchase of handsome
furniture, together with a stock of wine, a grand piano, and the
laying out of a superior flower-garden, it followed in the most
rigorous manner, either that these things must be procured by some
other means, or else that the Rev. Mr. Stelling must go without them,
which last alternative would be an absurd procrastination of the
fruits of success, where success was certain. Mr. Stelling was so
broad-chested and resolute that he felt equal to anything; he would
become celebrated by shaking the consciences of his hearers, and he
would by and by edit a Greek play, and invent several new readings. He
had not yet selected the play, for having been married little more
than two years, his leisure time had been much occupied with
attentions to Mrs. Stelling; but he had told that fine woman what he
meant to do some day, and she felt great confidence in her husband, as
a man who understood everything of that sort.

But the immediate step to future success was to bring on Tom Tulliver
during this first half-year; for, by a singular coincidence, there had
been some negotiation concerning another pupil from the same
neighborhood and it might further a decision in Mr. Stelling's favor,
if it were understood that young Tulliver, who, Mr. Stelling observed
in conjugal privacy, was rather a rough cub, had made prodigious
progress in a short time. It was on this ground that he was severe
with Tom about his lessons; he was clearly a boy whose powers would
never be developed through the medium of the Latin grammar, without
the application of some sternness. Not that Mr. Stelling was a
harsh-tempered or unkind man; quite the contrary. He was jocose with
Tom at table, and corrected his provincialisms and his deportment in
the most playful manner; but poor Tom was only the more cowed and
confused by this double novelty, for he had never been used to jokes
at all like Mr. Stelling's; and for the first time in his life he had
a painful sense that he was all wrong somehow. When Mr. Stelling said,
as the roast-beef was being uncovered, "Now, Tulliver! which would you
rather decline, roast-beef or the Latin for it?" Tom, to whom in his
coolest moments a pun would have been a hard nut, was thrown into a
state of embarrassed alarm that made everything dim to him except the
feeling that he would rather not have anything to do with Latin; of
course he answered, "Roast-beef," whereupon there followed much
laughter and some practical joking with the plates, from which Tom
gathered that he had in some mysterious way refused beef, and, in
fact, made himself appear "a silly." If he could have seen a
fellow-pupil undergo these painful operations and survive them in good
spirits, he might sooner have taken them as a matter of course. But
there are two expensive forms of education, either of which a parent
may procure for his son by sending him as solitary pupil to a
clergyman: one is the enjoyment of the reverend gentleman's undivided
neglect; the other is the endurance of the reverend gentleman's
undivided attention. It was the latter privilege for which Mr.
Tulliver paid a high price in Tom's initiatory months at King's
Lorton.

That respectable miller and maltster had left Tom behind, and driven
homeward in a state of great mental satisfaction. He considered that
it was a happy moment for him when he had thought of asking Riley's
advice about a tutor for Tom. Mr. Stelling's eyes were so wide open,
and he talked in such an off-hand, matter-of-fact way, answering every
difficult, slow remark of Mr. Tulliver's with, "I see, my good sir, I
see"; "To be sure, to be sure"; "You want your son to be a man who
will make his way in the world,"--that Mr. Tulliver was delighted to
find in him a clergyman whose knowledge was so applicable to the
every-day affairs of this life. Except Counsellor Wylde, whom he had
heard at the last sessions, Mr. Tulliver thought the Rev. Mr Stelling
was the shrewdest fellow he had ever met with,--not unlike Wylde, in
fact; he had the same way of sticking his thumbs in the armholes of
his waistcoat. Mr. Tulliver was not by any means an exception in
mistaking brazenness for shrewdness; most laymen thought Stelling
shrewd, and a man of remarkable powers generally; it was chiefly by
his clerical brethren that he was considered rather a full fellow. But
he told Mr. Tulliver several stories about "Swing" and incendiarism,
and asked his advice about feeding pigs in so thoroughly secular and
judicious a manner, with so much polished glibness of tongue, that the
miller thought, here was the very thing he wanted for Tom. He had no
doubt this first-rate man was acquainted with every branch of
information, and knew exactly what Tom must learn in order to become a
match for the lawyers, which poor Mr. Tulliver himself did _not_ know,
and so was necessarily thrown for self-direction on this wide kind of
inference. It is hardly fair to laugh at him, for I have known much
more highly instructed persons than he make inferences quite as wide,
and not at all wiser.

As for Mrs. Tulliver, finding that Mrs. Stelling's views as to the
airing of linen and the frequent recurrence of hunger in a growing boy
entirely coincided with her own; moreover, that Mrs. Stelling, though
so young a woman, and only anticipating her second confinement, had
gone through very nearly the same experience as herself with regard to
the behavior and fundamental character of the monthly nurse,--she
expressed great contentment to her husband, when they drove away, at
leaving Tom with a woman who, in spite of her youth, seemed quite
sensible and motherly, and asked advice as prettily as could be.

"They must be very well off, though," said Mrs. Tulliver, "for
everything's as nice as can be all over the house, and that watered
silk she had on cost a pretty penny. Sister Pullet has got one like
it."

"Ah," said Mr. Tulliver, "he's got some income besides the curacy, I
reckon. Perhaps her father allows 'em something. There's Tom 'ull be
another hundred to him, and not much trouble either, by his own
account; he says teaching comes natural to him. That's wonderful,
now," added Mr. Tulliver, turning his head on one side, and giving his
horse a meditative tickling on the flank.

Perhaps it was because teaching came naturally to Mr. Stelling, that
he set about it with that uniformity of method and independence of
circumstances which distinguish the actions of animals understood to
be under the immediate teaching of nature. Mr. Broderip's amiable
beaver, as that charming naturalist tells us, busied himself as
earnestly in constructing a dam, in a room up three pair of stairs in
London, as if he had been laying his foundation in a stream or lake in
Upper Canada. It was "Binny's" function to build; the absence of water
or of possible progeny was an accident for which he was not
accountable. With the same unerring instinct Mr. Stelling set to work
at his natural method of instilling the Eton Grammar and Euclid into
the mind of Tom Tulliver. This, he considered, was the only basis of
solid instruction; all other means of education were mere
charlatanism, and could produce nothing better than smatterers. Fixed
on this firm basis, a man might observe the display of various or
special knowledge made by irregularly educated people with a pitying
smile; all that sort of thing was very well, but it was impossible
these people could form sound opinions. In holding this conviction Mr.
Stelling was not biassed, as some tutors have been, by the excessive
accuracy or extent of his own scholarship; and as to his views about
Euclid, no opinion could have been freer from personal partiality. Mr.
Stelling was very far from being led astray by enthusiasm, either
religious or intellectual; on the other hand, he had no secret belief
that everything was humbug. He thought religion was a very excellent
thing, and Aristotle a great authority, and deaneries and prebends
useful institutions, and Great Britain the providential bulwark of
Protestantism, and faith in the unseen a great support to afflicted
minds; he believed in all these things, as a Swiss hotel-keeper
believes in the beauty of the scenery around him, and in the pleasure
it gives to artistic visitors. And in the same way Mr. Stelling
believed in his method of education; he had no doubt that he was doing
the very best thing for Mr. Tulliver's boy. Of course, when the miller
talked of "mapping" and "summing" in a vague and diffident manner, Mr
Stelling had set his mind at rest by an assurance that he understood
what was wanted; for how was it possible the good man could form any
reasonable judgment about the matter? Mr Stelling's duty was to teach
the lad in the only right way,--indeed he knew no other; he had not
wasted his time in the acquirement of anything abnormal.

He very soon set down poor Tom as a thoroughly stupid lad; for though
by hard labor he could get particular declensions into his brain,
anything so abstract as the relation between cases and terminations
could by no means get such a lodgment there as to enable him to
recognize a chance genitive or dative. This struck Mr. Stelling as
something more than natural stupidity; he suspected obstinacy, or at
any rate indifference, and lectured Tom severely on his want of
thorough application. "You feel no interest in what you're doing,
sir," Mr. Stelling would say, and the reproach was painfully true. Tom
had never found any difficulty in discerning a pointer from a setter,
when once he had been told the distinction, and his perceptive powers
were not at all deficient. I fancy they were quite as strong as those
of the Rev. Mr. Stelling; for Tom could predict with accuracy what
number of horses were cantering behind him, he could throw a stone
right into the centre of a given ripple, he could guess to a fraction
how many lengths of his stick it would take to reach across the
playground, and could draw almost perfect squares on his slate without
any measurement. But Mr. Stelling took no note of these things; he
only observed that Tom's faculties failed him before the abstractions
hideously symbolized to him in the pages of the Eton Grammar, and that
he was in a state bordering on idiocy with regard to the demonstration
that two given triangles must be equal, though he could discern with
great promptitude and certainty the fact that they _were_ equal.
Whence Mr. Stelling concluded that Tom's brain, being peculiarly
impervious to etymology and demonstrations, was peculiarly in need of
being ploughed and harrowed by these patent implements; it was his
favorite metaphor, that the classics and geometry constituted that
culture of the mind which prepared it for the reception of any
subsequent crop. I say nothing against Mr. Stelling's theory; if we
are to have one regimen for all minds, his seems to me as good as any
other. I only know it turned out as uncomfortably for Tom Tulliver as
if he had been plied with cheese in order to remedy a gastric weakness
which prevented him from digesting it. It is astonishing what a
different result one gets by changing the metaphor! Once call the
brain an intellectual stomach, and one's ingenious conception of the
classics and geometry as ploughs and harrows seems to settle nothing.
But then it is open to some one else to follow great authorities, and
call the mind a sheet of white paper or a mirror, in which case one's
knowledge of the digestive process becomes quite irrelevant. It was
doubtless an ingenious idea to call the camel the ship of the desert,
but it would hardly lead one far in training that useful beast. O
Aristotle! if you had had the advantage of being "the freshest modern"
instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your
praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a
lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without
metaphor,--that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by
saying it is something else?

Tom Tulliver, being abundant in no form of speech, did not use any
metaphor to declare his views as to the nature of Latin; he never
called it an instrument of torture; and it was not until he had got on
some way in the next half-year, and in the Delectus, that he was
advanced enough to call it a "bore" and "beastly stuff." At present,
in relation to this demand that he should learn Latin declensions and
conjugations, Tom was in a state of as blank unimaginativeness
concerning the cause and tendency of his sufferings, as if he had been
an innocent shrewmouse imprisoned in the split trunk of an ash-tree in
order to cure lameness in cattle. It is doubtless almost incredible to
instructed minds of the present day that a boy of twelve, not
belonging strictly to "the masses," who are now understood to have the
monopoly of mental darkness, should have had no distinct idea how
there came to be such a thing as Latin on this earth; yet so it was
with Tom. It would have taken a long while to make conceivable to him
that there ever existed a people who bought and sold sheep and oxen,
and transacted the every-day affairs of life, through the medium of
this language; and still longer to make him understand why he should
be called upon to learn it, when its connection with those affairs had
become entirely latent. So far as Tom had gained any acquaintance with
the Romans at Mr. Jacob's academy, his knowledge was strictly correct,
but it went no farther than the fact that they were "in the New
Testament"; and Mr. Stelling was not the man to enfeeble and
emasculate his pupil's mind by simplifying and explaining, or to
reduce the tonic effect of etymology by mixing it with smattering,
extraneous information, such as is given to girls.

Yet, strange to say, under this vigorous treatment Tom became more
like a girl than he had ever been in his life before. He had a large
share of pride, which had hitherto found itself very comfortable in
the world, despising Old Goggles, and reposing in the sense of
unquestioned rights; but now this same pride met with nothing but
bruises and crushings. Tom was too clear-sighted not to be aware that
Mr. Stelling's standard of things was quite different, was certainly
something higher in the eyes of the world than that of the people he
had been living amongst, and that, brought in contact with it, he, Tom
Tulliver, appeared uncouth and stupid; he was by no means indifferent
to this, and his pride got into an uneasy condition which quite
nullified his boyish self-satisfaction, and gave him something of the
girl's susceptibility. He was a very firm, not to say obstinate,
disposition, but there was no brute-like rebellion and recklessness in
his nature; the human sensibilities predominated, and if it had
occurred to him that he could enable himself to show some quickness at
his lessons, and so acquire Mr. Stelling's approbation, by standing on
one leg for an inconvenient length of time, or rapping his head
moderately against the wall, or any voluntary action of that sort, he
would certainly have tried it. But no; Tom had never heard that these
measures would brighten the understanding, or strengthen the verbal
memory; and he was not given to hypothesis and experiment. It did
occur to him that he could perhaps get some help by praying for it;
but as the prayers he said every evening were forms learned by heart,
he rather shrank from the novelty and irregularity of introducing an
extempore passage on a topic of petition for which he was not aware of
any precedent. But one day, when he had broken down, for the fifth
time, in the supines of the third conjugation, and Mr. Stelling,
convinced that this must be carelessness, since it transcended the
bounds of possible stupidity, had lectured him very seriously,
pointing out that if he failed to seize the present golden opportunity
of learning supines, he would have to regret it when he became a
man,--Tom, more miserable than usual, determined to try his sole
resource; and that evening, after his usual form of prayer for his
parents and "little sister" (he had begun to pray for Maggie when she
was a baby), and that he might be able always to keep God's
commandments, he added, in the same low whisper, "and please to make
me always remember my Latin." He paused a little to consider how he
should pray about Euclid--whether he should ask to see what it meant,
or whether there was any other mental state which would be more
applicable to the case. But at last he added: "And make Mr. Stelling
say I sha'n't do Euclid any more. Amen."

The fact that he got through his supines without mistake the next day,
encouraged him to persevere in this appendix to his prayers, and
neutralized any scepticism that might have arisen from Mr. Stelling's
continued demand for Euclid. But his faith broke down under the
apparent absence of all help when he got into the irregular verbs. It
seemed clear that Tom's despair under the caprices of the present
tense did not constitute a _nodus_ worthy of interference, and since
this was the climax of his difficulties, where was the use of praying
for help any longer? He made up his mind to this conclusion in one of
his dull, lonely evenings, which he spent in the study, preparing his
lessons for the morrow. His eyes were apt to get dim over the page,
though he hated crying, and was ashamed of it; he couldn't help
thinking with some affection even of Spouncer, whom he used to fight
and quarrel with; he would have felt at home with Spouncer, and in a
condition of superiority. And then the mill, and the river, and Yap
pricking up his ears, ready to obey the least sign when Tom said,
"Hoigh!" would all come before him in a sort of calenture, when his
fingers played absently in his pocket with his great knife and his
coil of whipcord, and other relics of the past.

Tom, as I said, had never been so much like a girl in his life before,
and at that epoch of irregular verbs his spirit was further depressed
by a new means of mental development which had been thought of for him
out of school hours. Mrs. Stelling had lately had her second baby, and
as nothing could be more salutary for a boy than to feel himself
useful, Mrs. Stelling considered she was doing Tom a service by
setting him to watch the little cherub Laura while the nurse was
occupied with the sickly baby. It was quite a pretty employment for
Tom to take little Laura out in the sunniest hour of the autumn day;
it would help to make him feel that Lorton Parsonage was a home for
him, and that he was one of the family. The little cherub Laura, not
being an accomplished walker at present, had a ribbon fastened round
her waist, by which Tom held her as if she had been a little dog
during the minutes in which she chose to walk; but as these were rare,
he was for the most part carrying this fine child round and round the
garden, within sight of Mrs. Stelling's window, according to orders.
If any one considers this unfair and even oppressive toward Tom, I beg
him to consider that there are feminine virtues which are with
difficulty combined, even if they are not incompatible. When the wife
of a poor curate contrives, under all her disadvantages, to dress
extremely well, and to have a style of coiffure which requires that
her nurse shall occasionally officiate as lady's-maid; when, moreover,
her dinner-parties and her drawing-room show that effort at elegance
and completeness of appointment to which ordinary women might imagine
a large income necessary, it would be unreasonable to expect of her
that she should employ a second nurse, or even act as a nurse herself.
Mr. Stelling knew better; he saw that his wife did wonders already,
and was proud of her. It was certainly not the best thing in the world
for young Tulliver's gait to carry a heavy child, but he had plenty of
exercise in long walks with himself, and next half-year Mr. Stelling
would see about having a drilling-master. Among the many means whereby
Mr. Stelling intended to be more fortunate than the bulk of his
fellow-men, he had entirely given up that of having his own way in his
own house. What then? He had married "as kind a little soul as ever
breathed," according to Mr. Riley, who had been acquainted with Mrs.
Stelling's blond ringlets and smiling demeanor throughout her maiden
life, and on the strength of that knowledge would have been ready any
day to pronounce that whatever domestic differences might arise in her
married life must be entirely Mr. Stelling's fault.

If Tom had had a worse disposition, he would certainly have hated the
little cherub Laura, but he was too kind-hearted a lad for that; there
was too much in him of the fibre that turns to true manliness, and to
protecting pity for the weak. I am afraid he hated Mrs. Stelling, and
contracted a lasting dislike to pale blond ringlets and broad plaits,
as directly associated with haughtiness of manner, and a frequent
reference to other people's "duty." But he couldn't help playing with
little Laura, and liking to amuse her; he even sacrificed his
percussion-caps for her sake, in despair of their ever serving a
greater purpose,--thinking the small flash and bang would delight her,
and thereby drawing down on himself a rebuke from Mrs. Stelling for
teaching her child to play with fire. Laura was a sort of
playfellow--and oh, how Tom longed for playfellows! In his secret
heart he yearned to have Maggie with him, and was almost ready to dote
on her exasperating acts of forgetfulness; though, when he was at
home, he always represented it as a great favor on his part to let
Maggie trot by his side on his pleasure excursions.

And before this dreary half-year was ended, Maggie actually came. Mrs.
Stelling had given a general invitation for the little girl to come
and stay with her brother; so when Mr. Tulliver drove over to King's
Lorton late in October, Maggie came too, with the sense that she was
taking a great journey, and beginning to see the world. It was Mr.
Tulliver's first visit to see Tom, for the lad must learn not to think
too much about home.

"Well, my lad," he said to Tom, when Mr. Stelling had left the room to
announce the arrival to his wife, and Maggie had begun to kiss Tom
freely, "you look rarely! School agrees with you."

Tom wished he had looked rather ill.

"I don't think I _am_ well, father," said Tom; "I wish you'd ask Mr.
Stelling not to let me do Euclid; it brings on the toothache, I
think."

(The toothache was the only malady to which Tom had ever been
subject.)

"Euclid, my lad,--why, what's that?" said Mr. Tulliver.

"Oh, I don't know; it's definitions, and axioms, and triangles, and
things. It's a book I've got to learn in--there's no sense in it."

"Go, go!" said Mr. Tulliver, reprovingly; "you mustn't say so. You
must learn what your master tells you. He knows what it's right for
you to learn."

"_I'll_ help you now, Tom," said Maggie, with a little air of
patronizing consolation. "I'm come to stay ever so long, if Mrs.
Stelling asks me. I've brought my box and my pinafores, haven't I,
father?"

"_You_ help me, you silly little thing!" said Tom, in such high
spirits at this announcement that he quite enjoyed the idea of
confounding Maggie by showing her a page of Euclid. "I should like to
see you doing one of _my_ lessons! Why, I learn Latin too! Girls never
learn such things. They're too silly."

"I know what Latin is very well," said Maggie, confidently, "Latin's a
language. There are Latin words in the Dictionary. There's bonus, a
gift."

"Now, you're just wrong there, Miss Maggie!" said Tom, secretly
astonished. "You think you're very wise! But 'bonus' means 'good,' as
it happens,--bonus, bona, bonum."

"Well, that's no reason why it shouldn't mean 'gift,'" said Maggie,
stoutly. "It may mean several things; almost every word does. There's
'lawn,'--it means the grass-plot, as well as the stuff
pocket-handkerchiefs are made of."

"Well done, little 'un," said Mr. Tulliver, laughing, while Tom felt
rather disgusted with Maggie's knowingness, though beyond measure
cheerful at the thought that she was going to stay with him. Her
conceit would soon be overawed by the actual inspection of his books.

Mrs. Stelling, in her pressing invitation, did not mention a longer
time than a week for Maggie's stay; but Mr. Stelling, who took her
between his knees, and asked her where she stole her dark eyes from,
insisted that she must stay a fortnight. Maggie thought Mr. Stelling
was a charming man, and Mr. Tulliver was quite proud to leave his
little wench where she would have an opportunity of showing her
cleverness to appreciating strangers. So it was agreed that she should
not be fetched home till the end of the fortnight.

"Now, then, come with me into the study, Maggie," said Tom, as their
father drove away. "What do you shake and toss your head now for, you
silly?" he continued; for though her hair was now under a new
dispensation, and was brushed smoothly behind her ears, she seemed
still in imagination to be tossing it out of her eyes. "It makes you
look as if you were crazy."

"Oh, I can't help it," said Maggie, impatiently. "Don't tease me, Tom.
Oh, what books!" she exclaimed, as she saw the bookcases in the study.
"How I should like to have as many books as that!"

"Why, you couldn't read one of 'em," said Tom, triumphantly. "They're
all Latin."

"No, they aren't," said Maggie. "I can read the back of
this,--'History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'"

"Well, what does that mean? _You_ don't know," said Tom, wagging his
head.

"But I could soon find out," said Maggie, scornfully.

"Why, how?"

"I should look inside, and see what it was about."

"You'd better not, Miss Maggie," said Tom, seeing her hand on the
volume. "Mr. Stelling lets nobody touch his books without leave, and
_I_ shall catch it, if you take it out."

"Oh, very well. Let me see all _your_ books, then," said Maggie,
turning to throw her arms round Tom's neck, and rub his cheek with her
small round nose.

Tom, in the gladness of his heart at having dear old Maggie to dispute
with and crow over again, seized her round the waist, and began to
jump with her round the large library table. Away they jumped with
more and more vigor, till Maggie's hair flew from behind her ears, and
twirled about like an animated mop. But the revolutions round the
table became more and more irregular in their sweep, till at last
reaching Mr. Stelling's reading stand, they sent it thundering down
with its heavy lexicons to the floor. Happily it was the ground-floor,
and the study was a one-storied wing to the house, so that the
downfall made no alarming resonance, though Tom stood dizzy and aghast
for a few minutes, dreading the appearance of Mr. or Mrs. Stelling.

"Oh, I say, Maggie," said Tom at last, lifting up the stand, "we must
keep quiet here, you know. If we break anything Mrs. Stelling'll make
us cry peccavi."

"What's that?" said Maggie.

"Oh, it's the Latin for a good scolding," said Tom, not without some
pride in his knowledge.

"Is she a cross woman?" said Maggie.

"I believe you!" said Tom, with an emphatic nod.

"I think all women are crosser than men," said Maggie. "Aunt Glegg's a
great deal crosser than uncle Glegg, and mother scolds me more than
father does."

"Well, _you'll_ be a woman some day," said Tom, "so _you_ needn't
talk."

"But I shall be a _clever_ woman," said Maggie, with a toss.

"Oh, I dare say, and a nasty conceited thing. Everybody'll hate you."

"But you oughtn't to hate me, Tom; it'll be very wicked of you, for I
shall be your sister."

"Yes, but if you're a nasty disagreeable thing I _shall_ hate you."

"Oh, but, Tom, you won't! I sha'n't be disagreeable. I shall be very
good to you, and I shall be good to everybody. You won't hate me
really, will you, Tom?"

"Oh, bother! never mind! Come, it's time for me to learn my lessons.
See here! what I've got to do," said Tom, drawing Maggie toward him
and showing her his theorem, while she pushed her hair behind her
ears, and prepared herself to prove her capability of helping him in
Euclid. She began to read with full confidence in her own powers, but
presently, becoming quite bewildered, her face flushed with
irritation. It was unavoidable; she must confess her incompetency, and
she was not fond of humiliation.

"It's nonsense!" she said, "and very ugly stuff; nobody need want to
make it out."

"Ah, there, now, Miss Maggie!" said Tom, drawing the book away, and
wagging his head at her, "You see you're not so clever as you thought
you were."

"Oh," said Maggie, pouting, "I dare say I could make it out, if I'd
learned what goes before, as you have."

"But that's what you just couldn't, Miss Wisdom," said Tom. "For it's
all the harder when you know what goes before; for then you've got to
say what definition 3 is, and what axiom V. is. But get along with you
now; I must go on with this. Here's the Latin Grammar. See what you
can make of that."

Maggie found the Latin Grammar quite soothing after her mathematical
mortification; for she delighted in new words, and quickly found that
there was an English Key at the end, which would make her very wise
about Latin, at slight expense. She presently made up her mind to skip
the rules in the Syntax, the examples became so absorbing. These
mysterious sentences, snatched from an unknown context,--like strange
horns of beasts, and leaves of unknown plants, brought from some
far-off region,--gave boundless scope to her imagination, and were all
the more fascinating because they were in a peculiar tongue of their
own, which she could learn to interpret. It was really very
interesting, the Latin Grammar that Tom had said no girls could learn;
and she was proud because she found it interesting. The most
fragmentary examples were her favourites. _Mors omnibus est communis_
would have been jejune, only she liked to know the Latin; but the
fortunate gentleman whom every one congratulated because he had a son
"endowed with _such_ a disposition" afforded her a great deal of
pleasant conjecture, and she was quite lost in the "thick grove
penetrable by no star," when Tom called out,--

"Now, then, Magsie, give us the Grammar!"

"Oh, Tom, it's such a pretty book!" she said, as she jumped out of the
large arm-chair to give it him; "it's much prettier than the
Dictionary. I could learn Latin very soon. I don't think it's at all
hard."

"Oh, I know what you've been doing," said Tom; "you've been reading
the English at the end. Any donkey can do that."

Tom seized the book and opened it with a determined and business-like
air, as much as to say that he had a lesson to learn which no donkeys
would find themselves equal to. Maggie, rather piqued, turned to the
bookcases to amuse herself with puzzling out the titles.

Presently Tom called to her: "Here, Magsie, come and hear if I can say
this. Stand at that end of the table, where Mr. Stelling sits when he
hears me."

Maggie obeyed, and took the open book.

"Where do you begin, Tom?"

"Oh, I begin at _'Appellativa arborum,'_ because I say all over again
what I've been learning this week."

Tom sailed along pretty well for three lines; and Maggie was beginning
to forget her office of prompter in speculating as to what _mas_ could
mean, which came twice over, when he stuck fast at _Sunt etiam
volucrum_.

"Don't tell me, Maggie; _Sunt etiam volucrum_--_Sunt etiam
volucrum_--_ut ostrea, cetus_----"

"No," said Maggie, opening her mouth and shaking her head.

"_Sunt etiam volucrum_," said Tom, very slowly, as if the next words
might be expected to come sooner when he gave them this strong hint
that they were waited for.

"C, e, u," said Maggie, getting impatient.

"Oh, I know--hold your tongue," said Tom. "_Ceu passer, hirundo;
Ferarum_--_ferarum_----" Tom took his pencil and made several hard
dots with it on his book-cover--"_ferarum_----"

"Oh dear, oh dear, Tom," said Maggie, "what a time you are! _Ut_----"

"_Ut ostrea_----"

"No, no," said Maggie, "_ut tigris_----"

"Oh yes, now I can do," said Tom; "it was _tigris, vulpes_, I'd
forgotten: _ut tigris, volupes; et Piscium_."

With some further stammering and repetition, Tom got through the next
few lines.

"Now, then," he said, "the next is what I've just learned for
to-morrow. Give me hold of the book a minute."

After some whispered gabbling, assisted by the beating of his fist on
the table, Tom returned the book.

"_Mascula nomina in a_," he began.

"No, Tom," said Maggie, "that doesn't come next. It's _Nomen non
creskens genittivo_----"

"_Creskens genittivo!_" exclaimed Tom, with a derisive laugh, for Tom
had learned this omitted passage for his yesterday's lesson, and a
young gentleman does not require an intimate or extensive acquaintance
with Latin before he can feel the pitiable absurdity of a false
quantity. "_Creskens genittivo!_ What a little silly you are, Maggie!"

"Well, you needn't laugh, Tom, for you didn't remember it at all. I'm
sure it's spelt so; how was I to know?"

"Phee-e-e-h! I told you girls couldn't learn Latin. It's _Nomen non
crescens genitivo_."

"Very well, then," said Maggie, pouting. "I can say that as well as you
can. And you don't mind your stops. For you ought to stop twice as
long at a semicolon as you do at a comma, and you make the longest
stops where there ought to be no stop at all."

"Oh, well, don't chatter. Let me go on."

They were presently fetched to spend the rest of the evening in the
drawing-room, and Maggie became so animated with Mr. Stelling, who,
she felt sure, admired her cleverness, that Tom was rather amazed and
alarmed at her audacity. But she was suddenly subdued by Mr.
Stelling's alluding to a little girl of whom he had heard that she
once ran away to the gypsies.

"What a very odd little girl that must be!" said Mrs. Stelling,
meaning to be playful; but a playfulness that turned on her supposed
oddity was not at all to Maggie's taste. She feared that Mr. Stelling,
after all, did not think much of her, and went to bed in rather low
spirits. Mrs. Stelling, she felt, looked at her as if she thought her
hair was very ugly because it hung down straight behind.

Nevertheless it was a very happy fortnight to Maggie, this visit to
Tom. She was allowed to be in the study while he had his lessons, and
in her various readings got very deep into the examples in the Latin
Grammar. The astronomer who hated women generally caused her so much
puzzling speculation that she one day asked Mr. Stelling if all
astronomers hated women, or whether it was only this particular
astronomer. But forestalling his answer, she said,--

"I suppose it's all astronomers; because, you know, they live up in
high towers, and if the women came there they might talk and hinder
them from looking at the stars."

Mr. Stelling liked her prattle immensely, and they were on the best
terms. She told Tom she should like to go to school to Mr. Stelling,
as he did, and learn just the same things. She knew she could do
Euclid, for she had looked into it again, and she saw what A B C
meant; they were the names of the lines.

"I'm sure you couldn't do it, now," said Tom; "and I'll just ask Mr.
Stelling if you could."

"I don't mind," said the little conceited minx, "I'll ask him myself."

"Mr. Stelling," she said, that same evening when they were in the
drawing-room, "couldn't I do Euclid, and all Tom's lessons, if you
were to teach me instead of him?"

"No, you couldn't," said Tom, indignantly. "Girls can't do Euclid; can
they, sir?"

"They can pick up a little of everything, I dare say," said Mr.
Stelling. "They've a great deal of superficial cleverness; but they
couldn't go far into anything. They're quick and shallow."

Tom, delighted with this verdict, telegraphed his triumph by wagging
his head at Maggie, behind Mr. Stelling's chair. As for Maggie, she
had hardly ever been so mortified. She had been so proud to be called
"quick" all her little life, and now it appeared that this quickness
was the brand of inferiority. It would have been better to be slow,
like Tom.

"Ha, ha! Miss Maggie!" said Tom, when they were alone; "you see it's
not such a fine thing to be quick. You'll never go far into anything,
you know."

And Maggie was so oppressed by this dreadful destiny that she had no
spirit for a retort.

But when this small apparatus of shallow quickness was fetched away in
the gig by Luke, and the study was once more quite lonely for Tom, he
missed her grievously. He had really been brighter, and had got
through his lessons better, since she had been there; and she had
asked Mr. Stelling so many questions about the Roman Empire, and
whether there really ever was a man who said, in Latin, "I would not
buy it for a farthing or a rotten nut," or whether that had only been
turned into Latin, that Tom had actually come to a dim understanding
of the fact that there had once been people upon the earth who were so
fortunate as to know Latin without learning it through the medium of
the Eton Grammar. This luminous idea was a great addition to his
historical acquirements during this half-year, which were otherwise
confined to an epitomized history of the Jews.

But the dreary half-year _did_ come to an end. How glad Tom was to see
the last yellow leaves fluttering before the cold wind! The dark
afternoons and the first December snow seemed to him far livelier than
the August sunshine; and that he might make himself the surer about
the flight of the days that were carrying him homeward, he stuck
twenty-one sticks deep in a corner of the garden, when he was three
weeks from the holidays, and pulled one up every day with a great
wrench, throwing it to a distance with a vigor of will which would
have carried it to limbo, if it had been in the nature of sticks to
travel so far.

But it was worth purchasing, even at the heavy price of the Latin
Grammar, the happiness of seeing the bright light in the parlor at
home, as the gig passed noiselessly over the snow-covered bridge; the
happiness of passing from the cold air to the warmth and the kisses
and the smiles of that familiar hearth, where the pattern of the rug
and the grate and the fire-irons were "first ideas" that it was no
more possible to criticise than the solidity and extension of matter.
There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where
we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the
labor of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of
our own personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own
sense of existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly,
that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to
auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the
striving after something better and better in our surroundings the
grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute, or, to
satisfy a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the
British man from the foreign brute? But heaven knows where that
striving might lead us, if our affections had not a trick of twining
round those old inferior things; if the loves and sanctities of our
life had no deep immovable roots in memory. One's delight in an
elderberry bush overhanging the confused leafage of a hedgerow bank,
as a more gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading
itself on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable
preference to a nursery-gardener, or to any of those regulated minds
who are free from the weakness of any attachment that does not rest on
a demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason
for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early
memory; that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely
through my present sensibilities to form and color, but the long
companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys
were vivid.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Tom is Rev. Stelling's only pupil at King's Lorton, and he finds life difficult. He is good at games but a poor scholar, and now that he has no companions he feels lost. Furthermore, he cannot despise Rev. Stelling as he did Mr. Jacobs at the academy, for "if there were anything that was not thoroughly genuine about Mr. Stelling, it lay quite beyond Tom's power to detect it." Mr. Stelling is an ambitious man, impressive in appearance and eloquence, but of no particular ability as a scholar or teacher. He lives well beyond his means, for "a clergyman who has such vigorous intentions naturally gets a little into debt at starting . . . ." Tom is treated as a member of the family, but he has not capacity for Latin grammar and no comprehension of Mr. Stelling's sense of humor. Mr. Stelling has assured Mr. Tulliver that Tom will learn "to be a man who will make his way in the world"; but Tulliver has no definite idea of what is required, and Stelling knows only one way to educate a young man. Consequently, Tom receives a thorough drilling in Latin grammar and geometry, and Mr. Stelling "very soon set down poor Tom as a thoroughly stupid lad." Tom is aware that he appears "uncouth and stupid," but he is unable to take any interest in his lessons. He longs for home, and to do something useful he watches over Stelling's infant daughter. He begins to yearn to have Maggie with him. In October Maggie comes to visit. She is extremely interested in Tom's lessons. Tom tells her that girls can't learn Latin, but she shows a quick grasp of the examples in his book. However, she thinks his geometry is nonsense. After she has been there a fortnight, Maggie begins to understand Euclid, and at last she asks Mr. Stelling if she couldn't learn to do Tom's lessons as well as he. Tom is indignant, and Mr. Stelling agrees with him that women "have a great deal of superficial cleverness; but they couldn't go far into anything." Maggie is crushed by this. After Maggie leaves, Tom is lonely again; but at last the time comes for his Christmas holidays; and his delight in the homecoming makes it almost worth it, "even at the heavy price of the Latin Grammar . . . ."