Mr. Caxton, growing cross.—­“Oh, if you cannot treat on bucolics but what you must hear some Virgil or other cry ‘Stop thief,’ you deserve to be tossed by one of your own ’short-horns.’—­(Still more contemptuously)—­I am sure I don’t know why we spend so much money on sending our sons to school to learn Latin, when that Anchronism of yours, Mrs. Caxton, can’t even construe a line and a half of Phaedrus.  Phaedrus, Mrs. Caxton—­a book which is in Latin what Goody Two Shoes is in the vernacular!”

Mrs. Caxton, alarmed and indignant.—­“Fie, Austin!  I am sure you can construe Phaedrus, dear!”

Pisistratus prudently preserves silence.

Mr. Caxton.—­“I’ll try him—­

  “’Sua cuique quum sit animi cogitatio
  Colorque proprius.’

“What does that mean?”

Pisistratus, smiling.—­“That every man has some coloring matter within him, to give his own tinge to—­”

“His own novel,” interrupted my father! “Contentus peragis.”

During the latter part of this dialogue, Blanche had sewn together three quires of the best Bath paper, and she now placed them on a little table before me, with her own inkstand and steel pen.

My mother put her finger to her lip, and said, “Hush!” my father returned to the cradle of the AEsar; Captain Roland leant his cheek on his hand, and gazed abstractedly on the fire; Mr. Squills felt into a placid doze; and, after three sighs that would have melted a heart of stone, I rushed into—­MY NOVEL.

* * * * *

CHAPTER II.

“There has never been occasion to use them since I have been in the Parish,” said Parson Dale.

“What does that prove?” quoth the Squire sharply, and looking the Parson full in the face.

“Prove!” repeated Mr. Dale—­with a smile of benign, yet too conscious superiority—­“What does experience prove?”

“That your forefathers were great blockheads, and that their descendant is not a whit the wiser.”

“Squire,” replied the Parson, “although that is a melancholy conclusion, yet if you mean it to apply universally, and not to the family of the Dales in particular, it is not one which my candor as a reasoner, and my Humility as a mortal, will permit me to challenge.”

“I defy you,” said Mr. Hazledean triumphantly.  “But to stick to the subject, which it is monstrous hard to do when one talks with a parson, I only just ask you to look yonder, and tell me on your conscience—­I don’t even say as a parson, but as a parishioner—­whether you ever saw a more disreputable spectacle?”

While he spoke, the Squire, leaning heavily on the Parson’s left shoulder, extended his cane in a line parallel with the right of that disputatious ecclesiastic, so that he might guide the organ of sight to the object he had thus flatteringly described.