Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century -- Fiction
Two men were left alone; sulky William and respectable Meadows. Both
these men's eyes followed George into the house, and each had a strong
emotion they were bent on concealing, and did conceal from each other;
but was it concealed from all the world?
The farm-house had two rooms looking upon the spot where most of our
tale has passed.
The smaller one of these was a little state parlor, seldom used by the
family. Here on a table was a grand old folio Bible; the names, births,
and deaths of a century of Fieldings appeared in rusty ink and various
handwritings upon its fly-leaf.
Framed on the walls were the first savage attempts of woman at
worsted-work in these islands. There were two moral commonplaces, and
there was the forbidden fruit-tree, whose branches diverged, at set
distances like the radii of a circle, from its stem, a perpendicular
line; exactly at the end of each branch hung one forbidden
fruit--pre-Raphaelite worsted-work.
There were also two prints of more modern date, one agricultural, one
manufactural.
No. 1 was a great show of farming implements at Doncaster.
No. 2 showed how, one day in the history of man and of mutton, a sheep
was sheared, her wool washed, teased, carded, etc., and the cloth *'d
and *'d and *'d and *'d, and a coat shaped and sewed and buttoned upon a
goose, whose preparations for inebriating the performers and spectators
of his feat appeared in a prominent part of the picture.
The window of this sunny little room was open and on the sill was a row
of flower-pots from which a sweet fresh smell crept with the passing air
into the chamber.
Behind these flower-pots for two hours past had crouched--all eye and
ear and mind--a keen old man.
To Isaac Levi age had brought vast experience, and had not yet dimmed
any one of his senses. More than forty-five years ago he had been
brought to see that men seldom act or speak so as to influence the
fortunes of others without some motive of their own; and that these
motives are seldom the motives they advance; and that their real motives
are not always known to themselves, and yet can nearly always be read
and weighed by an intelligent bystander.
So for near half a century Isaac Levi had read that marvelous page of
nature written on black, white and red parchments, and called “Man.”
One result of his perusal was this, that the heads of human tribes
differ far more than their hearts.
The passions and the heart he had found intelligible and much the same
from Indus to the Pole.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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