any doctor within ten miles of Brokesbourne had been able to effect—that his face, though brown, was as bright as sunshine, and his laugh was like music in the house, which had been melancholy enough since Frederic went to those far distant countries; but which, since the death of his father, had been gloomy to misery.
However intense the love of Lord Meersbrook was for his brother, yet he had felt some little misgivings as to the way he would impress two people so advanced in life, as his venerable grandfather and his great aunt. In his own schoolboy days, he well remembered that, with great tenderness, and many indulgences, there were yet many lectures given, and many rules made, into which he had fallen easily, but which Arthur never could observe more than an hour at a time; for, however willing to be on his good behaviour, that buoyancy of boyish spirits Miss Edgeworth happily terms "superfluous animation" was continually goading him into the perpetration of petty mischiefs and boisterous merriment. This disposition his subsequent life had not tended to change in any considerable degree, though increased knowledge, with much observation, and a little reading, had rendered the gaiety of the young man a very different thing to the obstreperous mirth of the boy. Few persons of his age had seen so much of climates and races as Arthur, for he had been two or three years with his father in different parts of India, before he
