CHAPTER VIII. NOAH AND MOSES.

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• Shirley   CHAPTER XXXVII. THE WINDING-UP.

  Yes, reader, we must settle accounts now. I have only briefly to narrate the final fates of some of the personages whose acquaintance we have made in this narrative, and then you and I must shake hands, and for the present separate.Let us turn to the curates—to the much-loved, though long-neglected. Come forward, modest merit! Malone, I see, promptly answers the invocation. He knows his own description when he hears it.No, Peter Augustus; we can have nothing to say to you. It won't do. Impossible to trust ourselves with the touching tale of your deeds and destinies. Are you not aware, Peter, that a discriminating public has its crotchets; that the unvarnished truth does not answer; that plain facts will not digest? Do you not know that the squeak of the real pig is no more relished now than it was in days of yore? Were I to give the catastrophe of your life and conversation, the public would sweep off in shrieking hysterics, and there would be a wild cry for sal-volatile and burnt

• Shirley   CHAPTER XXXVI. WRITTEN IN THE SCHOOLROOM.

  Louis Moore's doubts respecting the immediate evacuation of Fieldhead by Mr. Sympson turned out to be perfectly well founded. The very next day after the grand quarrel about Sir Philip Nunnely a sort of reconciliation was patched up between uncle and niece. Shirley, who could never find it in her heart to be or to seem inhospitable (except in the single instance of Mr. Donne), begged the whole party to stay a little longer. She begged in such earnest it was evident she wished it for some reason. They took her at her word. Indeed, the uncle could not bring himself to leave her quite unwatched—at full liberty to marry Robert Moore as soon as that gentleman should be able (Mr. Sympson piously prayed this might never be the case) to reassert his supposed pretensions to her hand. They all stayed.In his first rage against all the house of Moore, Mr. Sympson had so conducted himself towards Mr. Louis that that gentleman—patient of labour or suffering, but intolerant of coarse insolence—had

• Shirley   CHAPTER XXXV. WHEREIN MATTERS MAKE SOME PROGRESS, BUT NOT MUCH.

  Martin had planned well. He had laid out a dexterously concerted scheme for his private amusement. But older and wiser schemers than he are often doomed to see their finest-spun projects swept to annihilation by the sudden broom of Fate, that fell housewife whose red arm none can control. In the present instance this broom was manufactured out of the tough fibres of Moore's own stubborn purpose, bound tight with his will. He was now resuming his strength, and making strange head against Mrs. Horsfall. Each morning he amazed that matron with a fresh astonishment. First he discharged her from her valet duties; he would dress himself. Then he refused the coffee she brought him; he would breakfast with the family. Lastly, he forbade her his chamber. On the same day, amidst the outcries of all the women in the place, he put his head out of doors. The morning after, he followed Mr. Yorke to his counting-house, and requested an envoy to fetch a chaise from the Red House Inn. He was resolved,

• Shirley   CHAPTER XXXIV.

  CASE OF DOMESTIC PERSECUTION--REMARKABLE INSTANCE OF PIOUS PERSEVERANCE IN THE DISCHARGE OF RELIGIOUS DUTIES.Martin, having known the taste of excitement, wanted a second draught; having felt the dignity of power, he loathed to relinquish it. Miss Helstone—that girl he had always called ugly, and whose face was now perpetually before his eyes, by day and by night, in dark and in sunshine—had once come within his sphere. It fretted him to think the visit might never be repeated.Though a schoolboy he was no ordinary schoolboy; he was destined to grow up an original. At a few years' later date he took great pains to pare and polish himself down to the pattern of the rest of the world, but he never succeeded; an unique stamp marked him always. He now sat idle at his desk in the grammar school, casting about in his mind for the means of adding another chapter to his commenced romance. He did not yet know how many commenced life-romances are doomed never to get beyond the first, or at mo

• Shirley   CHAPTER XXXIII. MARTIN'S TACTICS.

  It was necessary to the arrangement of Martin's plan that he should stay at home that day. Accordingly, he found no appetite for breakfast, and just about school-time took a severe pain about his heart, which rendered it advisable that, instead of setting out to the grammar school with Mark, he should succeed to his father's arm-chair by the fireside, and also to his morning paper. This point being satisfactorily settled, and Mark being gone to Mr. Summer's class, and Matthew and Mr. Yorke withdrawn to the counting-house, three other exploits—nay, four—remained to be achieved.The first of these was to realize the breakfast he had not yet tasted, and with which his appetite of fifteen could ill afford to dispense; the second, third, fourth, to get his mother, Miss Moore, and Mrs. Horsfall successfully out of the way before four o'clock that afternoon.The first was, for the present, the most pressing, since the work before him demanded an amount of energy which the present empty cond

• Shirley   CHAPTER XXXII. THE SCHOOLBOY AND THE WOOD-NYMPH.

  Briarmains being nearer than the Hollow, Mr. Yorke had conveyed his young comrade there. He had seen him laid in the best bed of the house, as carefully as if he had been one of his own sons. The sight of his blood, welling from the treacherously inflicted wound, made him indeed the son of the Yorkshire gentleman's heart. The spectacle of the sudden event, of the tall, straight shape prostrated in its pride across the road, of the fine southern head laid low in the dust, of that youth in prime flung at once before him pallid, lifeless, helpless—this was the very combination of circumstances to win for the victim Mr. Yorke's liveliest interest.No other hand was there to raise—to aid, no other voice to question kindly, no other brain to concert measures; he had to do it all himself. This utter dependence of the speechless, bleeding youth (as a youth he regarded him) on his benevolence secured that benevolence most effectually. Well did Mr. Yorke like to have power, and to use it. He ha