one of the Miss Nettleships, our kind and dear friends. With this brother, but with none of the others, we had a warm and lasting friendship.

Gaius ought to have done nothing, said nothing, without first consulting my father. On the contrary, he disseminated these complaints about the town. My father called him to account, and upon an explanation he had to submit; but there never was any love lost between the two, even though, as I have been reminded, they had sometimes to act together in official duties.

CHAPTER XXXV.

CHANGE IN THE TOWN AND IN THE COUNTRY.

THE good people who fifty years ago talked so sneeringly of progress, march of mind, diffusion of knowledge, and the elevation of the classes, had taken little heed of the new circumstances under which an increasing part of the people were born and bred. The population of the towns was everywhere increasing, that of the country standing still or decreasing. In a village, and even more in those numerous and extensive districts where the habitations are too scattered to form a village, there is change indeed, but it is far from revolutionary, very seldom even progressive. One year is like another. Every year Nature wakes out of a long sleep, and repeats the most magnificent of all performances meeting human eye. The actors, who are also the spectators, rehearse their

LABOR ACTUS IN ORBEM.

213

respective parts on this stage, generally observing immemorial traditions. After a climax-a triumph, or a catastrophe -the curtain drops, and Nature slumbers again. Life and death, health and sickness, joy and sorrow, vary the tenor of life; but such human accidents are soon buried in the grave, and almost as soon drop from memory. Nature remains. In

most parts of the country the enclosures, the lanes, the banks, or the hedgerows are believed to have been the same for perhaps thousands of years, bearing still the names given them by races no longer there, or perhaps anywhere. No wonder that people bred under such constancy of condition should be suspicious of them that are given to change.

All animal life is so unchangeable in its manners and ways, as to suggest the rather painful doubt whether it is automatous, and whether it is not altogether subject to material laws. They whose whole life is spent among such creatures, cannot help looking for some such reliable consistency in the ways of the human race. They don't wish to see society suddenly the victim of new and uncontrollable instincts. They have no hope or craving for innovations that shall make the present as if it had never been. Nature with them is its own master, its own teacher, its own history, and its own monument. They are no more wearied of its perpetual reiteration than a child is of the old, old story, or the bigger child of his holiday game. Why change, when all we have to do is to learn by practice, and do the same thing better?

Against all this towns have their steady and un

interrupted material progress. They advance, and, unless by some calamity, have no retrograde march. They never cease to grow. They acquire numbers, add to their buildings, extend their streets, and develop new industries. All that they see about them points to a future. In the famous year 1815 I was just beginning to feel this national instinct of a mighty growth. The two first stages of my own part in it were the two towns I had now pretty well mastered. Already in Derby there was the promise of that development; for there were some new public buildings, there was at least one institution of an ambitious character, and there were the great families of the Strutts and the Arkwrights ever racking their brains for some new addition to our physical comforts. But at that period it was more the world at large that I was thinking of than the town, which, as a child, I was likely to regard as very unchangeable, or at least very slow of growth.

Of one thing I am certain. During that long hour in the still air, in the twilight of the last day of 1815, and under the kindling stars, I never had the least forethought of any of the things that have actually happened to me and to mine, to the town and to the country and to the world. What I foresaw I know not, for it never came to pass. The spot I stood on was, for the time, my earth's centre. It had then many characteristic features. It and its surroundings have now been transformed beyond all recognition.

MARY AND ELIZA.

215

CHAPTER XXXVI.

A DUKE'S TENANT.

Near Ret

NOT a few of our Gainsborough friendships followed us to Derby, and we all felt an unfailing interest in those who reminded us of our old home. ford lived a brother and two sisters. They were first cousins of the Nettleships, to whom I have given the chapter headed 'A Sun-lit Spot'; but how there came to be such a difference of quality between the cousins I know not. The brother, and his father before him, had held large farms under the Duke of Newcastle, and, at a time when prices were high, and sheepfarming, light soils, and rotation crops were beginning to be understood, he had made a large fortune, and become a landowner.

His two sisters were our friends, Mary and Eliza. Mary was handsome, and had been pretty. She was lively, talkative, and agreeable, though without much of the wit that comes by culture and society. She was serious in her religious views, but sadly hindered in her path. She had had many offers in her youth, that is, her very youth, and now she was said to keep a drawer full of them, and to consider occasionally what she had better have done in regard to them. One suitor, certainly, she could never quite dismiss from her heart. He had made her an offer, and she had refused him, fully believing that he would renew his offer, when she intended to accept it. He thought

she was in earnest, and I think she never saw him afterwards but once, a long way off, on Waterloo Bridge.

The sisters found themselves with ample means, with no calls upon them, and entirely free to live where they pleased and form what friendships they pleased. Most people will think they could hardly fail to be happy, and that they had only to thank Heaven that they were spared common trials. But they were not literary; they had nothing to do but what work they could manage to find for themselves; and they had to kill time one way or other. So they fussed about dress, they fussed about investments for their money, and they fussed a little, occasionally, about the care of their souls.

Poor Mary, the elder, handsomer, and brighter, thought much of what best became her. She wore stylish bonnets, kept her figure within bounds, and for the sake of pretty shoes endured sore feet and chilblains. Eliza was more sensible, and as good, but she had no figure, no looks, and not much conversation. She was not likely to have admirers. The sisters followed us to Derby, took a good house in Friargate, and lived there some years. Eliza was a great chess-player, and could always be sure of one of us to play with. My brother John was her most frequent antagonist. They were well matched, for they were both patient and both slow.

At Derby the sisters did as other people did. They went excursions, took summer lodgings at Matlock or at Quarndon, and contributed much to the pleasantness of our little circle. I know no better