Archie looked back ruefully at the devastated pleasure-grounds. The fir cone boundary was knocked over at one corner. All privacy was lost; anything might get in now, and the duck, if she recovered, could get out. It was much to be regretted. "Poor damn John," said Archie, slipping his hand into that of the grown-up child whom he had for a father. "Poor John!" echoed Colonel Tempest, his temper evaporating a little, "I only wish it _were_ poor John; and not poor Archie. That was _your_ garden, Archie, do you hear, my boy--yours, not his. And you shall have it, too, if I can get it for you." "I don't want it now," said Archie, gravely; "you've spoilt it." CHAPTER II. "And another dieth in the bitterness of his soul."--JOB xxi. 25. A profound knowledge of human nature enunciated the decree, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's _house_," and relegated the neighbour's wife to a back seat among the servants and live stock. The intense love of a house, passing the love even of prohibited women, is a passion which those who "nightly pitch their moving tents" in villas and hired dwellings, and look upon heaven as their home, can hardly imagine, and frequently regard with the amused contempt of ignorance. But where pride is a leading power the affections will be generally found immediately in its wake. In these days it is the fashion, especially of the vulgar-minded well-born, to decry birth as being of no account. Those who do so, apparently fail to perceive that, by the very fact of decrying it, they proclaim their own innate lack of appreciation of those very advantages of refinement, manners, and a certain distinction and freemasonry of feeling, which birth has evidently withheld from them personally, but which, nevertheless, birth alone can bestow. The strong hereditary pride of race which is as natural a result of time and fixed habitat as the forest oak--which is bred in the bone and comes out in the flesh from generation to generation--is accompanied, as a rule, by a passionate love, not of houses, but of _the_ house, the home, the eyrie, the one sacred spot from which the race sprang.