What were this lady’s feelings when forced to admit the truth whereof her foreboding glass had given her only too true warning, that within her beauty her reign had ended, and the days of her love were over?  What does a seaman do in a storm if mast and rudder are carried away?  He ships a jurymast, and steers as he best can with an oar.  What happens if your roof falls in a tempest?  After the first stun of the calamity the sufferer starts up, gropes around to see that the children are safe, and puts them under a shed out of the rain.  If the palace burns down, you take shelter in the barn.  What man’s life is not overtaken by one or more of these tornadoes that send us out of the course, and fling us on rocks to shelter as best we may?

When Lady Castlewood found that her great ship had gone down, she began as best she might after she had rallied from the effects of the loss, to put out small ventures of happiness; and hope for little gains and returns, as a merchant on ’Change, indocilis pauperiem pati, having lost his thousands, embarks a few guineas upon the next ship.  She laid out her all upon her children, indulging them beyond all measure, as was inevitable with one of her kindness of disposition; giving all her thoughts to their welfare—­learning, that she might teach them; and improving her own many natural gifts and feminine accomplishments, that she might impart them to her young ones.  To be doing good for some one else, is the life of most good women.  They are exuberant of kindness, as it were, and must impart it to some one.  She made herself a good scholar of French, Italian, and Latin, having been grounded in these by her father in her youth; hiding these gifts from her husband out of fear, perhaps, that they should offend him, for my lord was no bookman—­pish’d and psha’d at the notion of learned ladies, and would have been angry that his wife could construe out of a Latin book of which he could scarce understand two words.  Young Esmond was usher, or house tutor, under her or over her, as it might happen.  During my lord’s many absences, these school-days would go on uninterruptedly:  the mother and daughter learning with surprising quickness; the latter by fits and starts only, and as suited her wayward humor.  As for the little lord, it must be owned that he took after his father in the matter of learning—­liked marbles and play, and the great horse and the little one which his father brought him, and on which he took him out a-hunting, a great deal better than Corderius and Lily; marshalled the village boys, and had a little court of them, already flogging them, and domineering over them with a fine imperious spirit, that made his father laugh when he beheld it, and his mother fondly warn him.  The cook had a son, the woodman had two, the big lad at the porter’s lodge took his cuffs and his orders.  Doctor Tusher said he was a young nobleman of gallant spirit; and Harry Esmond, who was his tutor, and eight years his little lordship’s senior, had hard work sometimes to keep his own temper, and hold his authority over his rebellious little chief and kinsman.