For my part, I take the goods the gods provide me, and am contented with girls that have the eyes of their mother; but Roland, ungrateful man, begins to grumble that we are so neglectful of the rights of heirs--male. He is in doubt whether to lay the fault on Mr. Squills or on us,--I am not sure that he does not think it a conspiracy of all three to settle the representation of the martial De Caxtons on the "spindle side." Whosoever be the right person to blame, an omission so fatal to the straight line in the pedigree is rectified at last, and Mrs. Primmins again rushes, or rather rolls--in the movement natural to forms globular and spheral--into my father's room with-- "Sir, sir, it is a boy!" Whether my father asked also this time that question so puzzling to metaphysical inquirers, "What is a boy?" I know not: I rather suspect he had not leisure for so abstract a question; for the whole household burst on him, and my mother, in that storm peculiar to the elements of the Mind Feminine--a sort of sunshiny storm between laughter and crying--whirled him off to behold the Neogilos. Now, some months after that date, on a winter's evening, we were all assembled in the hall, which was still our usual apartment, since its size permitted to each his own segregated and peculiar employment. A large screen fenced off from interruption my father's erudite settlement; and quite out of sight, behind that impermeable barrier, he was now calmly winding up that eloquent peroration which will astonish the world whenever, by Heaven's special mercy, the printer's devils have done with "The History of Human Error." In another nook my uncle had ensconced himself, stirring his coffee (in the cup my mother had presented to him so many years ago, and which had miraculously escaped all the ills the race of crockery is heir to), a volume of "Ivanhoe" in the other hand, and, despite the charm of the Northern Wizard, his eye not on the page. On the wall behind him hangs the picture of Sir Herbert de Caxton, the soldier-comrade of Sidney and Drake, and at the foot of the picture Roland has slung his son's sword beside the letter that spoke of his death, which is framed and glazed,--sword and letter had become as the last, nor least honored, Penates of the hall; the son was grown an ancestor.