However, don’t suppose that I sat like a mute through that dinner. When my uncle addressed me I contrived to answer him in a style that, I had no doubt, maintained my credit with my aunt. One reply of mine--I forget what it was, and I am very glad I do--made the old gentleman burst into a tremendous roar of laughter, and from that moment he took a great deal of notice of me, encouraged my small attempts to exhibit my parts and wit, and took wine with me, nodding his head with a cordial smile, and crying out, before he put the glass to his lips, how he wished the major made one of us. After my aunt and Conny had left the room, we three gentlemen grew really affectionate. The two brothers shook hands several times with each other, and several times with me, from no other reason whatever, than an overflowing impulse. Old days were recalled and old scenes re-enacted. While my uncle Dick fished one beaming recollection after another out of the grey tide of the past, my uncle Tom was watching him eagerly to observe when he stopped, in order to top the reminiscence with another. Some characteristic anecdotes of my father were repeated and roared over. Then my uncle Dick, having laughed himself grave, grew sentimental, spoke with hazy eyes of his dead wife, of his pet Teazer, who was dear to him as his right hand, as the apple of his eye; of departed friends, whose wit had often cheered, whose kindness had often soothed him. Never an ill word for dead or living fell from him. A bright scene! a happy evening! a pleasant and gracious memory--when the world was younger with him who writes this--of cordiality and good will, of brotherly love as fresh and childlike still as ever it was in the old nursery days! Shall we believe, Eugenio, all that the cynics tell us? Do relations so universally hate one another as these gentlemen make out they do? You have told me of aunts who have been as faithful in the love of their dead sisters’ offspring as ever their mothers were; I have told you of brothers whose self sacrifices for one another would fill a volume with tales of deeper interest than could even be found in narratives of the most awful murders, or in minute accounts of the most unblushing bigamies. Should a cynic expectorate after tasting a glass of Madeira, would you accept his spittle as a sample of the wine he has drunk? Neither should you regard the instances he relates to you of family feuds as typical of the actual feelings that bind relations one to another. “And now, my boy,” said uncle Dick to me, “when are you coming to Thistlewood?” “Name a day convenient to yourself,” I replied, “and then uncle Tom will perhaps give us his sense of the matter.” “Never mind the bank,” exclaimed uncle Tom, “go whenever you like, and stop as long as you like.” “I shall return from London on Thursday,” said uncle Dick, “and, if you’ll come to me on that day, say so, and I’ll send a telegram to Teazer to-morrow, to have a bed-room prepared for you.”