“Madam,” said Mr. Esmond, “Ahasuerus was the Grand Turk, and to change was the manner of his country, and according to his law.”

“You are all Grand Turks for that matter,” said my lady, “or would be if you could.  Come, Frank, come, my child.  You are well, praised be Heaven.  Your locks are not thinned by this dreadful small-pox:  nor your poor face scarred—­is it, my angel?”

Frank began to shout and whimper at the idea of such a misfortune.  From the very earliest time the young lord had been taught to admire his beauty by his mother:  and esteemed it as highly as any reigning toast valued hers.

One day, as he himself was recovering from his fever and illness, a pang of something like shame shot across young Esmond’s breast, as he remembered that he had never once during his illness given a thought to the poor girl at the smithy, whose red cheeks but a month ago he had been so eager to see.  Poor Nancy! her cheeks had shared the fate of roses, and were withered now.  She had taken the illness on the same day with Esmond—­she and her brother were both dead of the small-pox, and buried under the Castlewood yew-trees.  There was no bright face looking now from the garden, or to cheer the old smith at his lonely fireside.  Esmond would have liked to have kissed her in her shroud (like the lass in Mr. Prior’s pretty poem); but she rested many a foot below the ground, when Esmond after his malady first trod on it.

Doctor Tusher brought the news of this calamity, about which Harry Esmond longed to ask, but did not like.  He said almost the whole village had been stricken with the pestilence; seventeen persons were dead of it, among them mentioning the names of poor Nancy and her little brother.  He did not fail to say how thankful we survivors ought to be.  It being this man’s business to flatter and make sermons, it must be owned he was most industrious in it, and was doing the one or the other all day.

And so Nancy was gone; and Harry Esmond blushed that he had not a single tear for her, and fell to composing an elegy in Latin verses over the rustic little beauty.  He bade the dryads mourn and the river-nymphs deplore her.  As her father followed the calling of Vulcan, he said that surely she was like a daughter of Venus, though Sievewright’s wife was an ugly shrew, as he remembered to have heard afterwards.  He made a long face, but, in truth, felt scarcely more sorrowful than a mute at a funeral.  These first passions of men and women are mostly abortive; and are dead almost before they are born.  Esmond could repeat, to his last day, some of the doggerel lines in which his muse bewailed his pretty lass; not without shame to remember how bad the verses were, and how good he thought them; how false the grief, and yet how he was rather proud of it.  ’Tis an error, surely, to talk of the simplicity of youth.  I think no persons are more hypocritical, and have a more affected behavior to one another, than the young.  They deceive themselves and each other with artifices that do not impose upon men of the world; and so we get to understand truth better, and grow simpler as we grow older.