This was Grace Clifford’s petition, and need we say she prevailed?

Walter Clifford recovered under his wife’s care, and the house was so large that Colonel Clifford easily persuaded his son and daughter-in-law to make it their home.  Hope had also two rooms in it, and came there when he chose; he was always welcome; but he was alone again, so to speak, and not quite forty years of age, and he was ambitious.  He began to rise in the world, whilst our younger characters, contented with their happiness and position, remained stationary.  Master of a great mine, able now to carry out his invention, member of several scientific associations, a writer for the scientific press, etc., he soon became a public and eminent man; he was consulted on great public works, and if he lives will be one of the great lights of science in this island.  He is great on electricity, especially on the application of natural forces to the lighting of towns.  He denounces all the cities that allow powerful streams to run past them and not work a single electric light.  But he goes further than that.  He ridicules the idea that it is beyond the resources of science to utilize thousands of millions of tons of water that are raised twenty-one feet twice in every twenty-four hours by the tides.  It is the skill to apply the force that is needed; not the force itself, which exceeds that of all the steam-engines in the nation.  And he says that the great scientific foible of the day is the neglect of natural forces, which are cheap and inexhaustible, and the mania for steam-engines and gas, which are expensive, and for coal, which is not to last forever.  He implores capital and science to work in this question.  His various schemes for using the tides in the creation of motive power will doubtless come before the world in a more appropriate channel than a work of fiction.  If he succeeds it will be a glorious, as it must be a difficult, achievement.

His society is valued on social grounds; his well-stored mind, his powers of conversation, and his fine appearance, make him extremely welcome at all the tables in the county; he also accompanies his daughter with the violin, and, as they play beauties together, not difficulties, they ravish the soul and interrupt the torture, whose instrument the piano-forte generally is.

Bartley is a man with beautiful silvery hair and beard; he cultivates, nurses, and tends fruit-trees and flowers with a love little short of paternal.  This sentiment, and the contemplation of nature, have changed the whole expression of his face; it is wonderfully benevolent and sweet, but with a touch of weakness about the lips.  Some of the rough fellows about the place call him a “softy,” but that is much too strong a word; no doubt he is confused in his ideas, but he reads all the great American publications about fruit and flowers, and executes their instructions with tact and skill.  Where he breaks down—­and who would believe this?—­is in the trade