One sultry evening in the second week of June, the weather had again got inside the inhabitants of the castle, forming different combinations according to the local atmosphere it found in each.  Clouds had been slowly steaming up all day from several sides of the horizon, and as the sun went down, they met in the zenith.  Not a wing seemed to be abroad under heaven, so still was the region of storms.  The air was hot and heavy and hard to breathe—­whether from lack of life, or too much of it, oppressing the narrow and weak recipients thereof, as the sun oppresses and extinguishes earthly fires, I at least cannot say.  It was weather that made some dogs bite their masters, made most of the maids quarrelsome, and all the men but one or two more or less sullen, made Dorothy sad, Molly long after she knew not what, her mother weep, her grandfather feel himself growing old, and the hearts of all the lovers, within and without the castle, throb for the comfort of each other’s lonely society.  The fish lay still in the ponds, the pigeons sat motionless on the roof-ridges, and the fountains did not play; for Dorothy’s heart was so heavy about Molly, that she had forgotten them.

The marquis, fond of all his grandchildren, had never taken special notice of Molly beyond what she naturally claimed as youngest.  But when it appeared that she was one of the spring-flowers of the human family, so soon withdrawing thither whence they come, he found that she began to pull at his heart, not merely with the attraction betwixt childhood and age, in which there is more than the poets have yet sung, but with the dearness which the growing shadow of death gives to all upon whom it gathers.  The eyes of the child seemed to nestle into his bosom.  Every morning he paid her a visit, and every morning it was clear that little Molly’s big heart had been waiting for him.  The young as well as the old recognize that they belong to each other, despite the unwelcome intervention of wrinkles and baldness and toothlessness.  Molly’s eyes brightened when she heard his steps at the door, and ere he had come within her sight, where she lay half-dressed on her mother’s bed, tented in its tall carved posts and curtains of embroidered silk, the figures on which gave her so much trouble all the half-delirious night long, her arms would be stretched out to him, and the words would be trembling on her lips, ‘Prithee, tell me a tale, sir.’

‘Which tale wouldst thou have, my Molly?’ the grandsire would say:  it was the regular form of each day’s fresh salutation; and the little one would answer, ‘Of the good Jesu,’ generally adding, ’and of the damsel which fell sick and died.’

Torn as the country was, all the good grandparents, catholic and protestant, royalist and puritan, told their children the same tales about the same man; and I suspect there was more then than there is now of that kind of oral teaching, for which any amount of books written for children is a sadly poor substitute.