“Fred and Mary! are you ever coming in?—­or may I eat your cake?”

FINALE.

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.  Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years?  For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web:  promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.

Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness.  It is still the beginning of the home epic—­the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.

Some set out, like Crusaders of old, with a glorious equipment of hope and enthusiasm and get broken by the way, wanting patience with each other and the world.

All who have cared for Fred Vincy and Mary Garth will like to know that these two made no such failure, but achieved a solid mutual happiness.  Fred surprised his neighbors in various ways.  He became rather distinguished in his side of the county as a theoretic and practical farmer, and produced a work on the “Cultivation of Green Crops and the Economy of Cattle-Feeding” which won him high congratulations at agricultural meetings.  In Middlemarch admiration was more reserved:  most persons there were inclined to believe that the merit of Fred’s authorship was due to his wife, since they had never expected Fred Vincy to write on turnips and mangel-wurzel.

But when Mary wrote a little book for her boys, called “Stories of Great Men, taken from Plutarch,” and had it printed and published by Gripp & Co., Middlemarch, every one in the town was willing to give the credit of this work to Fred, observing that he had been to the University, “where the ancients were studied,” and might have been a clergyman if he had chosen.

In this way it was made clear that Middlemarch had never been deceived, and that there was no need to praise anybody for writing a book, since it was always done by somebody else.

Moreover, Fred remained unswervingly steady.  Some years after his marriage he told Mary that his happiness was half owing to Farebrother, who gave him a strong pull-up at the right moment.  I cannot say that he was never again misled by his hopefulness:  the yield of crops or the profits of a cattle sale usually fell below his estimate; and he was always prone to believe that he could make money by the purchase of a horse which turned out badly—­ though this, Mary observed, was of course the fault of the horse, not of Fred’s judgment.  He kept his love of horsemanship, but he rarely allowed himself a day’s hunting; and when he did so, it was remarkable that he submitted to be laughed at for cowardliness at the fences, seeming to see Mary and the boys sitting on the five-barred gate, or showing their curly heads between hedge and ditch.