Mr. Tulliver spoke his mind very strongly when he
reached home that evening; and the effect was seen
in the remarkable fact that Maggie never heard one
reproach from her mother, or one taunt from Tom, about
this foolish business of her running away to the gypsies.
Maggie was rather awe-stricken by this unusual treatment,
and sometimes thought that her conduct had been too
wicked to be alluded to.
Mr. and Mrs. Glegg at Home
In order to see Mr. and Mrs. Glegg at home, we must
enter the town of St. Ogg’s,—that
venerable town with the red fluted roofs and the broad
warehouse gables, where the black ships unlade themselves
of their burthens from the far north, and carry away,
in exchange, the precious inland products, the well-crushed
cheese and the soft fleeces which my refined readers
have doubtless become acquainted with through the
medium of the best classic pastorals.
It is one of those old, old towns which impress one
as a continuation and outgrowth of nature, as much
as the nests of the bower-birds or the winding galleries
of the white ants; a town which carries the traces
of its long growth and history like a millennial tree,
and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between
the river and the low hill from the time when the
Roman legions turned their backs on it from the camp
on the hillside, and the long-haired sea-kings came
up the river and looked with fierce, eager eyes at
the fatness of the land. It is a town “familiar
with forgotten years.” The shadow of the
Saxon hero-king still walks there fitfully, reviewing
the scenes of his youth and love-time, and is met
by the gloomier shadow of the dreadful heathen Dane,
who was stabbed in the midst of his warriors by the
sword of an invisible avenger, and who rises on autumn
evenings like a white mist from his tumulus on the
hill, and hovers in the court of the old hall by the
river-side, the spot where he was thus miraculously
slain in the days before the old hall was built.
It was the Normans who began to build that fine old
hall, which is, like the town, telling of the thoughts
and hands of widely sundered generations; but it is
all so old that we look with loving pardon at its
inconsistencies, and are well content that they who
built the stone oriel, and they who built the Gothic
facade and towers of finest small brickwork with the
trefoil ornament, and the windows and battlements
defined with stone, did not sacreligiously pull down
the ancient half-timbered body with its oak-roofed
banqueting-hall.
