Then the habits of the owners of such old seats are sure to fall into a sort of rhyme. There are the lesser beats at intervals through the long day, when the early laborer’s bell, and the gong at nine o’clock, and one o’clock, and seven o’clock, sound the call to prayers and to meals. And there are the weekly beats, when Sunday makes the beautiful refrain of the psalm of life. And yet again there are the half-yearly summer strophe and winter antistrophe of habits of each season, taken up and laid down with unfailing punctuality, while the family life oscillates like a pendulum between the first of May, which sees the domestic exodus into the fresh, vast old drawing-room, and the first of November, which brings the return into the warm, oak-panelled library. To violate or alter these long-established rules and precedents scarcely enters into the head of any one, and the child hears the old servants (themselves the most dear and permanent institutions of all) speak of them almost as if they were so many laws of nature. Thus he finds life from the very beginning set for him to a kind of music, simple and beautiful in its way; and he learns to think that “Order is Heaven’s first law,” and that change will never come over the placid tenor of existence. The difficulty to him is to realize in after years that any vicissitudes have really taken place in the old home, that it has changed owners, or that the old order has given place to new. He almost feels—thinking perhaps of his mother in her wonted seat—that Shelley’s dreamy philosophy must be true “That garden sweet, that lady fair, And all bright shapes and odors there, In truth have never passed away: ’Tis we, ’tis ours, have changed, not they.”