Not that in equivocal reference to the _povertiresque_ old farmer Millthorpe, Pierre is here intended to be hinted at. Still, man can not wholly escape his surroundings. Unconsciously Mrs. Glendinning had always been one of these curious Optimists; and in his boyish life Pierre had not wholly escaped the maternal contagion. Yet often, in calling at the old farmer's for Charles of some early winter mornings, and meeting the painfully embarrassed, thin, feeble features of Mrs. Millthorpe, and the sadly inquisitive and hopelessly half-envious glances of the three little girls; and standing on the threshold, Pierre would catch low, aged, life-weary groans from a recess out of sight from the door; then would Pierre have some boyish inklings of something else than the pure _povertiresque_ in poverty: some inklings of what it might be, to be old, and poor, and worn, and rheumatic, with shivering death drawing nigh, and present life itself but a dull and a chill! some inklings of what it might be, for him who in youth had vivaciously leaped from his bed, impatient to meet the earliest sun, and lose no sweet drop of his life, now hating the beams he once so dearly loved; turning round in his bed to the wall to avoid them; and still postponing the foot which should bring him back to the dismal day; when the sun is not gold, but copper; and the sky is not blue, but gray; and the blood, like Rhenish wine, too long unquaffed by Death, grows thin and sour in the veins. Pierre had not forgotten that the augmented penury of the Millthorpe's was, at the time we now retrospectively treat of, gravely imputed by the gossiping frequenters of the Black Swan Inn, to certain insinuated moral derelictions of the farmer. "The old man tipped his elbow too often," once said in Pierre's hearing an old bottle-necked fellow, performing the identical same act with a half-emptied glass in his hand. But though the form of old Millthorpe was broken, his countenance, however sad and thin, betrayed no slightest sign of the sot, either past or present. He never was publicly known to frequent the inn, and seldom quitted the few acres he cultivated with his son. And though, alas, indigent enough, yet was he most punctually honest in paying his little debts of shillings and pence for his groceries. And though, heaven knows, he had plenty of occasion for all the money he could possibly earn, yet Pierre remembered, that when, one autumn, a hog was bought of him for the servants' hall at the Mansion, the old man never called for his money till the midwinter following; and then, as with trembling fingers he eagerly clutched the silver, he unsteadily said, "I have no use for it now; it might just as well have stood over." It was then, that chancing to overhear this, Mrs. Glendinning had looked at the old man, with a kindly and benignantly interested eye to the _povertiresque_; and murmured, "Ah! the old English Knight is not yet out of his blood. Bravo, old man!"