CHAPTER XIX. "Providence, or chance, or fatal sway, Comes with resistless force and finds, or makes a way. One moment can retard the appointed hour. DRYDEN. ALTHOUGH entering on "the golden age of my history, I do not choose for it that pagan title; it is unsuitable-because we are all Christians and many of us saints. I remember too the immortal Don holding the handful of acorns, and making his eloquent oration to the goatherds, and, (those boundaries, John Hardy's hedge-rows, being passed,) I find nothing that corresponds to the great knight-errant's description. Besides, however much I might have been disposed to remain in his garden, and make a golden age, I could not do it. There was our village eager to have its millennium, its reign of virtue and contentment, chronicled. Every one agreed before it came, that it was to be one of connubial bliss. We were to have a succession of weddings, commencing with Lord Woreham, and ending with Carver, his chief butler; and in the matrimonial crisis which was reached, even my hero, Hardy, was to find a wife,—even he, who has been so lately in a state which made old bachelorhood his most probable destiny. Well, he does find a wife! There is a matrimonial crisis approaching, but I must have time, for I have to speak of something still more important. The reign of felicity concerned not my village alone, it concerned England. It came some twenty years ago, when every man, woman, and child, was to be made. rich. Of course, all being rich, all were to be happy, and the long predicted millennium had begun-begun in Liverpool. Yes, we saw then, the period of which the poet speaks, when, "Some one day, some wondrous chance appears, Which happened not in centuries of years." In all the centuries of years which had gone before, railways were not; and then, they were. This point being reached, my man of "the unconquerable will, and courage, never to submit or yield," discovered that what he had planned for himself, might be accomplished with much less labour, and in much less time, than he had dared to anticipate a few years before. The vein of traffic which, after his failure he began to work,-exploiter in the French phrase,-turned out well, as I have said. But he saw that all his countrymen were going to do something more than well, and he had certainly adopted no principle which forbade him to participate in the general prosperity. He did participate in it largely. Yet, at the moment when his good fortune became known, never did any one look so little like the child of success. The coldness of his demeanour, however, and the absence of all elation of manner in him, caused his reputation to rise amazingly. We have taught ourselves, (whether wisely or not, I cannot say,) to admire the man who smothers the natural and graceful expression of those emotions of grief or of joy, with which, his Maker in giving him a soul meant that it should be touched. But Hardy's want of elation in his success was not known. It was taken for the gravity of a mind occupied by great speculations, and won him much respect. He, being now a rich man acknowledged, found that he had advanced a grade in society; and he had thereupon matter for serious reflection. From the thoroughly British dinner he had progressed, to that at which a dish with a French name, was now and then discussed; other wines besides the staunch potations of Spain and Portugal were drunk; and the servants were of the male, not the female sex. social intercourse seemed Beyond this, the much the same; the conversation neither better nor worse. And to make this kind of advance, he said to himself, he had struggled against himself to give up heart and soul, love and life! For this, he was to be looked up to as the most respected of men! Was the gain worth the cost? No! he boldly answered, if what he then had gained were to be the be-all and the end-all of his toil. But Hardy would not have thus answered had he not had a glimpse of his uncle's Eden, |