seriously recommended by her friends to become a widow; she tried on the cap, and looked into many mirrors; but, after long inspection, decided upon still remaining a wife, because the weeds were so clearly unbecoming.  Habit, meanwhile, and that still-existing old aunt, who seemed resolved to live to a hundred, kept her as before at Burleigh:  and, seeing that a few months after the captain’s departure she had presented the world, not to say her truant lord, with twins, she had always found something to do in the way of, what she considered, education, and other juvenile amusement:  that is to say, when the gayeties of a circle of fifteen miles in radius left her any time to spare in such a process.  The twins—­a brace of boys—­were born and bred at Burleigh, and had attained severally to twenty years of age, just before their father came home again as brevet-major-general.  But both they, and that arrival, deserve special detail, each in its own chapter.

CHAPTER II.

The heroes.

Mrs. Tracy’s sons were as unlike each other as it is well possible for two human beings to be, both in person and character.  Julian, whose forward and bold spirit gained him from the very cradle every prerogative of eldership (and he did struggle first into life, too, so he was the first-born), had grown to be a swarthy, strong, big-boned man, of the Roman-nosed, or, more physiognomically, the Jewish cast of countenance; with melo-dramatic elf-locks, large whiskers, and ungovernable passions; loud, fierce, impetuous; cunning, too, for all his overbearing clamour; and an embodied personification of those choice essentials to criminal happiness—­a hard heart and a good digestion.  Charles, on the contrary (or, as logicians would say, on the contradictory), was fair-haired, blue-eyed, of Grecian features; slim, though well enough for inches, and had hitherto (as the commonalty have it) “enjoyed” weak health:  he was gentle and affectionate in heart, pure and religious in mind, studious and unobtrusive in habits.  It was a wonder to see the strange diversity between those own twin-brothers, born within the same hour, and, it is superfluous to add, of the same parents; brought up in all outward things alike, and who had shared equally in all that might be called advantage or disadvantage, of circumstance or education.

Certain is it that minds are different at birth, and require as different a treatment as Iceland moss from cactuses, or bull-dogs from bull-finches:  certain is it, too, that Julian, early submitted and resolutely broken in, would have made as great a man, as Charles, naturally meek, did make a good one; but for the matter of educating her boys, poor Mrs. Tracy had no more notion of the feat, than of squaring the circle, or determining the longitude.  She kept them both at home, till the peevish aunt could suffer Julian’s noise no longer:  the house was a Pandemonium,