the lamps, and bearing the week's produce into Gum ford in the rattling American wagon, did he not repent his folly?
No, he never regretted it. He revelled in the life of the country. "Health we have, if not wealth," he used to say. "Peace, if not prosperity. We live our own life, and like it."
Mrs. Dowling was happy in her husband's satisfaction. It seemed to her strange that such as he, refined, intellectual, admired, should have voluntarily exiled himself for a struggle for existence such as this.
"What would the old country and its influence be, good wife," he used to say, "if her sons had not been possessed, so often, of a desire to seek a fuller life abroad, to escape from the deadly conventionalities of an effete society, and to extend all that is best in the national life beyond every sea? What would England be save for her soldiers and sailors and settlers, who could not rest and rust at home?
"I know I have failed," he would sometimes admit, with momentary bitterness. "The greater fortune I dreamed of has never come. The little one I brought has vanished. But cheer up, wife, we'll never give in. None shall call us poor. Have I not my books and a little sphere in which, as Carlyle says, 'to create and to rule and be free'? You are happy, my darling. Perhaps we are of more use here in this uncouth, uncultivated land, where we may leave some fragrance of English fields and tastes behind us, than in dear, but dreamy, Fenshire."
The old man, in his shirt-sleeves, with slouched hat and rough buckskin gaiters, looked still as much the true gentleman as when with shining velveteen he followed the hounds at home, or received the Queen when her Majesty visited the provincial town to open the park presented by his elder brother.
