The children were rosy, fresh from their baths, and ready to eat like breakfast-loving English. Cornelius was half his breakfast ahead of the rest, for he had daily to endure the hardship of being at the bank by nine o'clock, and made the best of it by claiming in consequence an utter immunity from the _petite norale_ of the breakfast-table. Never did he lose a moment in helping anybody. Even the little Saffy he allowed with perfect frigidity to stretch out a very long arm after the butter--except indeed it happened to cross his plate, when he would sharply rebuke her breach of manners. It would have been all the same if he had not been going till noon, but now he had hurry and business to rampart his laziness and selfishness withal. Mark would sooner have gone without salt to his egg than ask Corney to pass it. This morning the pale boy sat staring at the crocuses--things like them peeping out of the spring-mould of his spirit to greet them. "Why don't you eat your breakfast, Mark, dear?" said his mother. "I'm not hungry, mamma," he answered. The mother looked at him a little anxiously. He was not a very vigorous boy in corporeal matters; but, unlike his father's, his light was almost always shining, and making the faces about him shine. After a few minutes, he said, as if unconsciously, his eyes fixed on the crocuses, "I can't think how they come!" "They grow!" said Saffy. Said her father, willing to set them thinking, "Didn't you see Hester make the paper flowers for her party?" "Yes," replied Saffy, "but it would take such a time to make all the flowers in the world that way!" "So it would; but if a great many angels took it in hand, I suppose they could do it." "That can't be how!" said Saffy, laughing; "for you know they come up out of the earth, and there ain't room to cut them out there!" "I think they must be cut out and put together before they are made!" said Mark, very slowly and thoughtfully. The supposition was greeted with a great burst of laughter from Cornelius. In the midst of a refined family he was the one vulgar, and behaved as the blind and stupid generally behave to those who see what they cannot see. Mockery is the share they choose in the motions of the life eternal! "Stop, stop, Cornelius!" said his father. "I suspect we have a young philosopher where you see only a silly little brother. He has, I fancy, got a glimpse of something he does not yet know how to say." "In that case, don't you think, sir," said Cornelius, "he had better hold his tongue till he does know how to say it?" It was not often he dared speak so to his father, but he was growing less afraid of him, though not through increase of love. His father looked at him a moment ere he replied, and his mother looked anxiously at her husband. "It _would_ be better," he answered quietly, "were he not among _friends_." The emphasis with which he spoke was lost on Cornelius.