"Peace!" said I, creeping cautiously within the circle of the stick. "No! I forewarn you--" "Peace! and describe to me my little cousin, your pretty daughter--for pretty I am sure she is." "Peace," said my uncle, smiling. "But you must come and judge for yourself." CHAPTER X. Uncle Roland was gone. Before he went, he was closeted for an hour with my father, who then accompanied him to the gate; and we all crowded round him as he stepped into his chaise. When the Captain was gone, I tried to sound my father as to the cause of so sudden a departure. But my father was impenetrable in all that related to his brother's secrets. Whether or not the Captain had ever confided to him the cause of his displeasure with his son,--a mystery which much haunted me,--my father was mute on that score, both to my mother and myself. For two or three days, however, Mr Caxton was evidently unsettled. He did not even take to his great work; but walked much alone, or accompanied only by the duck, and without even a book in his hand. But by degrees the scholarly habits returned to him; my mother mended his pens, and the work went on. For my part, left much to myself, especially in the mornings, I began to muse restlessly over the future. Ungrateful that I was, the happiness of home ceased to content me. I heard afar the roar of the great world, and roved impatient by the shore. At length, one evening, my father, with some modest hums and ha's, and an-unaffected blush on his fair forehead, gratified a prayer frequently urged on him, and read me some portions of "the great Work." I cannot express the feelings this lecture created--they were something akin to awe. For the design of this book was so immense--and towards its execution, a learning so vast and various had administered--that it seemed to me as if a spirit had opened to me a new world, which had always been before my feet, but which my own human blindness had hitherto concealed from me. The unspeakable patience with which all these materials had been collected year after year--the ease with which now, by the calm power of genius, they seemed of themselves to fall into harmony and system--the unconscious humility with which the scholar exposed the stores of a laborious life;--all combined to rebuke my own restlessness and ambition, while they filled me with a pride in my father, which saved my wounded egotism from a pang. Here, indeed, was one of those books which embrace an existence; like the Dictionary of Bayle, or the History of Gibbon, or the _Fasti Hellenici_ of Clinton,--it was a book to which thousands of books had contributed, only to make the originality of the single mind more bold and clear. Into the furnace all vessels of gold, of all ages, had been cast, but from the mould came the new coin, with its single stamp. And happily, the subject of the work did not forbid to the writer the indulgence of his _naïve_, peculiar irony of humour--so quiet, yet so profound.