Hartopp made a sly sign to him to say no more before Sophy, and then replied, addressing himself to her, “What is to be done? Nothing shall be done, my dear child, that you dislike. I don’t wish to part you two. Don’t hate me; lie down again; that’s a dear. There, I have smoothed your pillow for you. Oh, here’s your pretty doll again.” Sophy snatched at the doll petulantly, and made what the French call a moue at the good man as she suffered her grandfather to replace her on the sofa. “She has a strong temper of her own,” muttered the Mayor; “so has Anna Maria a strong temper!” Now, if I were anyway master of my own pen, and could write as I pleased, without being hurried along helter-skelter by the tyrannical exactions of that “young Rapid” in buskins and chiton called “THE HISTORIC MUSE,” I would break off this chapter, open my window, rest my eyes on the green lawn without, and indulge in a rhapsodical digression upon that beautifier of the moral life which is called “Good Temper.” Ha! the Historic Muse is dozing. By her leave!--Softly. CHAPTER XXI. Being an essay on temper in general, and a hazardous experiment on the reader’s in particular. There, the window is open! how instinctively the eye rests upon the green! How the calm colour lures and soothes it! But is there to the green only a single hue? See how infinite the variety of its tints! What sombre gravity in yon cedar, yon motionless pine-tree! What lively but unvarying laugh in yon glossy laurels! Do those tints charm us like the play in the young leaves of the lilac,--lighter here, darker there, as the breeze (and so slight the breeze!) stirs them into checker,--into ripple? Oh, sweet green, to the world what sweet temper is to man’s life! Who would reduce into one dye all thy lovely varieties? who exclude the dark steadfast verdure that lives on through the winter day; or the mutinous caprice of the gentler, younger tint that came fresh through the tears of April, and will shadow with sportive tremor the blooms of luxuriant June? Happy the man on whose marriage-hearth temper smiles kind from the eyes of woman! “No deity present,” saith the heathen proverb, “where absent Prudence;” no joy long a guest where Peace is not a dweller,--peace, so like Faith that they may be taken for each other, and poets have clad them with the same veil. But in childhood, in early youth, expect not the changeless green of the cedar. Wouldst thou distinguish fine temper from spiritless dulness, from cold simulation,--ask less what the temper than what the disposition.