Читать книгу A Whim, and Its Consequences - G. P. R. James - Страница 16

It was evening. The cottage fire blazed bright and warm. Two tallow candles were upon the table; for Chandos loved light, and burnt two tallow candles. Moreover, the people of the hamlet thought him a great man because he did so. Such is the appreciation of the world--such the all-pervading influence of the spirit of the country and the times--such the admiration of money in the United Kingdom! of Great Britain and Ireland, that the neighbouring peasantry thought him a much greater man than the last head-gardener, because he burnt two tallow candles, and the last burnt only one. Take it home to you, ye gentlemen in Grosvenor-square. Your services of gilded plate, your rich dinners, your innumerable lackeys, (none below six feet two), which gain you such envious reverence from those who use Sheffield plate, and content themselves with a foot-boy, is nothing more than the burning of two tallow candles, in the eyes of your inferiors in wealth. Be vain of it, if you can!

There was a neat row of books upon a shelf, against the little parlour wall. Many related to gardening; but there was Shakespeare and Milton, Ben, Beaumont and Fletcher, Herrick and Donne, and Cowley. Ranged near, too, were seen, in good old bindings, Virgil and Horace, Lucan, Tibullus, Martial, and Cicero. Ovid was not there; for Chandos had no taste for gods and goddesses en bagnio. Homer and Lucretius were put behind the rest, but where they could be got at easily.

There were tea-cups and saucers on the table; and the old woman who had been hired to keep his house orderly, and attend upon little Tim, after he had become a denizen of the cottage, was boiling the water in the adjoining kitchen.

"Great A," said Chandos; and, out of a number of pasteboard letters on the floor, the boy brought one, saying, "Great A. It looks like the roof of a house."

"Great B," repeated his self-installed master; and the boy brought great B, remarking that it was like two sausages on a skewer. For every letter he had some comparison; and it is wonderful how rapidly by his own system of mnemonics he had taught himself to recollect one from the other.