resolve. For himself and Mrs. Sandboys he feared not the infection of the Great Metropolis; but it was the young and trusting Elcy, and the too-adventurous Jobby—that caused the trepidation of his soul. First he thought of the sufferings and the privations around him—and then he asked himself whether he were making his children and his household suffer these for what was a mere whim on his own part. Was not the sacrifice he required too much for youthful minds, and was he not once young himself? The reply of experience was, that he certainly had been young, but that he never had felt any wish to travel further than ten miles from his native valley. And as the conflict of affection and determination went on in his brain, he now felt assured it was all selfishness on his part to keep his children locked up in abstemious solitude—and the next moment was declaring that he should be a woman and worse than a woman, if he were weak enough to allow them whom he loved best in all the world to be exposed to the vicious allurements of the Great Metropolis. Now he was all ice—and now the ice was thawing with the brine of his tears—now he was rock—and now, like Hannibal, he was cutting a way towards London through his bosom with the vinegar of repentance.
The first thing that met Mr. Sandboys' eyes in the morning was the pair of trousers in which he had driven the pig on the previous day. Again and again he gazed upon the ruins, for, until that moment, he had no definite idea as to the tatterdemalion state of his nether garments. The legs hung in long strips down the chair-back, more like shreds of list than human pantaloons; and, as he looked at them, he bethought him, for the first time, that his other pair, which he had just had made of his own grey, had been sent a fortnight previously to Johnson, the Loweswater tailor, to be altered, by Mrs. Sandboys, who took a great pride in her Cursty's appearance, and found fault with the cut of them, declaring they were not sufficiently tight at the knees, or wide enough over the boot, for the last new fashion.
Sandboys felt it was in vain for a man to talk of independence who was destitute of pantaloons, and fearing even to speak of the subject to his wife, lest a repetition of the previous night's scene might be enacted, sent a private message to his son Jobby, requesting his attendance to a conference in the bed-room.
Jobby, when informed of the primitive and paradisiacal condition of his parent, chuckled inwardly as he foresaw the dilemma in which the disclosure he had to make would place the nether half of the old gentleman. Accordingly, when Sandboys confidentially solicited him to put on his father's shoes, and make the greatest possible haste over to Johnson for his father's best trousers, it was with some difficulty that his son could inform him, with that respect which is due to a parent, that, on his last fruitless visit to Brackenthwaite, John Coss had told him he was going to call at Loweswater, on his way to Carlisle, and take up all the Johnsons, both uncle and nephew, for the mail train to London.
This was more than poor Sandboys expected, and a heavy blow to
