Everything in the family arrangements was marked by a sober precision, a grave and quiet self-possession.  There was little demonstrativeness of affection between parents and children, brothers and sisters, though great mutual affection and confidence.  It was not pride, nor sternness, but a sort of habitual shamefacedness, that kept far back in each soul those feelings which are the most beautiful in their outcome; but after a while, the habit became so fixed a nature, that a caressing or affectionate expression could not have passed the lips of one to another without a painful awkwardness.  Love was understood, once for all, to be the basis on which their life was built.  Once for all, they loved each other, and after that, the less said, the better.  It had cost the woman’s heart of Mrs. Marvyn some pangs, in the earlier part of her wedlock, to accept of this once for all, in place of those daily outgushings which every woman desires should be like God’s loving-kindness, “new every morning”; but hers, too, was a nature strongly inclining inward, and, after a few tremulous movements, the needle of her soul settled, and her life-lot was accepted,—­not as what she would like or could conceive, but as a reasonable and good one.  Life was a picture painted in low, cool tones, but in perfect keeping; and though another and brighter style might have pleased better, she did not quarrel with this.

Into this steady, decorous, highly-respectable circle the youngest child, James, made a formidable irruption.  One sometimes sees launched into a family-circle a child of so different a nature from all the rest, that it might seem as if, like an aerolite, he had fallen out of another sphere.  All the other babies of the Marvyn family had been of that orderly, contented sort who sleep till it is convenient to take them up, and while awake suck their thumbs contentedly and look up with large, round eyes at the ceiling when it is not convenient for their elders and betters that they should do anything else.  In farther advanced childhood, they had been quiet and decorous children, who could be all dressed and set up in chairs, like so many dolls, of a Sunday morning, patiently awaiting the stroke of the church-bell to be carried out and put into the wagon which took them over the two-miles’ road to church.  Possessed of such tranquil, orderly, and exemplary young offshoots, Mrs. Marvyn had been considered eminent for her “faculty” in bringing up children.

But James was destined to put “faculty,” and every other talent which his mother possessed, to rout.  He was an infant of moods and tenses, and those not of any regular verb.  He would cry of nights, and he would be taken up of mornings, and he would not suck his thumb, nor a bundle of caraway-seed tied in a rag and dipped in sweet milk, with which the good gossips in vain endeavored to pacify him.  He fought manfully with his two great fat fists the battle of babyhood, utterly reversed all nursery maxims,