But if you came to close quarters with the members of this great and highly distinguished family, you soon found yourself fundamentally astonished. You had a sensation come over you, as if you were trying, like Moses, to draw water from a rock, without his delegated power. There was a goodly outside of things before you, but nothing came of it. You talked, hoping to get talking in return; but you got little more than “noes,” and “yeses,” and “oh, indeeds!” and “reallys,” and sometimes not even that, but a certain look of dignity, or dignification, that was meant to serve for all purposes. There was a sort of resting on aristocratic oars or “sculls,” that were not to be too vulgarly handled. There was a feeling impressed on you, that eight hundred years of descent and ten thousand a year in landed income, did not trouble themselves with the trifling things that gave distinction to lesser people—such as literature, fine arts, politics, and general knowledge. These were very well for those who had nothing else to pride themselves on, but for the Rockvilles—oh, certainly they were by no means requisite! In fact, you found yourselves, with a little variation, in the predicament of Cowper’s people— “who spent their lives In dropping buckets into empty wells, And _growing tired_ of drawing nothing up.” Who has not often come across these dry wells of society?—solemn gulfs out of which you can pump nothing up? You know them—they are at your elbow every day in large and brilliant companies, and defy the best sucking-buckets ever invented to extract anything from them. But the Rockvilles were each and all of this actual description. It was a family feature, and they seemed, if either, rather proud of it. They must be so; for proud they were, amazingly proud, and they had nothing else to be proud of, except their acres and their ancestors. But the fact was, they could not help it, it was become organic. They had acted the justice of peace, and maintained the constitution against upstarts and manufacturers, signed warrants, supported the Church, and the house of correction, committed poachers, and then rested on the dignity of their ancestors for so many generations, that their sculls, brains, constitutions, and nervous systems were all so completely moulded into that shape, and baked in that mould, that a Rockville would be a Rockville to the end of time, if God and Nature would have allowed it. But such things wear out. The American Indians and the Australian natives wear out. They are not progressive: and as Nature abhors a vacuum, she does not forget the vacuum, wherever it may be, whether in a hot desert or in a cold and stately Rockville,—a very ancient, honourable, and substantial family that lies fallow till the thinking faculty literally dies out.