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"You eat little, my friend," said the Warden, pouring out a glass of sherry for Redclyffe, and another for himself. "But you are right, in such a predicament as yours. Spare your stomach while you are weakly, and it will help you when you are strong This, now, is the most enjoyable meal of the day with me. You will not see me play such a knife and fork at dinner; though there too, especially if I have ridden out in the afternoon, I do pretty well. But, come now, if (like most of your countrymen, as I have heard) you are a lover of the weed, I can offer you some as delicate Latakia as you are likely to find in England."

"I lack that claim upon your kindness, I am sorry to say," replied Redclyffe. "I am not a good smoker, though I have occasionally taken a cigar at need."

"Well, when you find yourself growing old, and especially if you chance to be a bachelor, I advise you to cultivate the habit," said the Warden. "A wife is the only real obstacle or objection to a pipe; they can seldom be thoroughly reconciled, and therefore it is well for a man to consider, beforehand, which of the two he can best dispense with. I know not how it might have been once, had the conflicting claim of these two rivals ever been fairly presented to me; but I now should be at no loss to choose the pipe."

They returned to the study; and while the Warden took his pipe, Redclyffe, considering that, as the guest of this hospitable Englishman, he had no right to continue a stranger, thought it fit to make known to him who he was, and his condition, plans, and purposes. He represented himself as having been liberally educated, bred to the law, but (to his misfortune) having turned aside from that profession to engage in politics. In this pursuit, indeed, his success wore a flattering outside; for he had become distinguished, and, though so young, a leader, locally at least, in the party which he had adopted. He had been, for a biennial term, a member of Congress, after winning some distinction in the legislature of his native State; but some one of those fitful changes to which American politics are peculiarly liable had thrown him out, in his candidacy for his second term; and the virulence of party animosity, the abusiveness of the press, had acted so much upon a disposition naturally somewhat too sensitive for the career which he had undertaken, that he had resolved, being now freed from legislative cares, to seize the opportunity for a visit to England, whither he was drawn by feelings which every educated and impressible American feels, in a degree scarcely conceivable by the English themselves. And being here (but he had already too much experience of English self-sufficiency to confess so much) he began to feel the deep yearning which a sensitive American--his mind full of English thoughts, his imagination of English poetry, his heart of English character and sentiment--cannot fail to be influenced by,--the yearning of the blood within his veins for that from which it has been estranged; the half-fanciful regret that he should ever have been separated from these woods, these fields, these natural features of scenery, to which his nature was moulded, from the men who are still so like himself, from these habits of life and thought which (though he may not have known them for two centuries) he still perceives to have remained in some mysterious way latent in the depths of his character, and soon to be reassumed, not as a foreigner would do it, but like habits native to him, and only suspended for a season.

This had been Redclyffe's state of feeling ever since he landed in England, and every day seemed to make him more at home; so that it seemed as if he were gradually awakening to a former reality.

CHAPTER XV.

After lunch, the Warden showed a good degree of kind anxiety about his guest, and ensconced him in a most comfortable chair in his study, where he gave him his choice of books old and new, and was somewhat surprised, as well as amused, to see that Redclyffe seemed most attracted towards a department of the library filled with books of English antiquities, and genealogies, and heraldry; the two latter, indeed, having the preference over the others.

"This is very remarkable," said he, smiling. "By what right or reason, by what logic of character, can you, a democrat, renouncing all advantages of birth,--neither priding yourself on family, nor seeking to found one,--how therefore can you care for genealogies, or for this fantastic science of heraldry? Having no antiquities, being a people just made, how can you care for them?"

"My dear sir," said Redclyffe, "I doubt whether the most devoted antiquarian in England ever cares to search for an old thing merely because it is old, as any American just landed on your shores would do. Age is our novelty; therefore it attracts and absorbs us. And as for genealogies, I know not what necessary repulsion there may be between it and democracy. A line of respectable connections, being the harder to preserve where there is nothing in the laws to defend it, is therefore the more precious when we have it really to boast of."

"True," said the Warden, "when a race keeps itself distinguished among the grimy order of your commonalty, all with equal legal rights to place and eminence as itself, it must needs be because there is a force and efficacy in the blood. I doubt not," he said, looking with the free approval of an elder man at the young man's finely developed face and graceful form,--"I doubt not that you can look back upon a line of ancestry, always shining out from the surrounding obscurity of the mob."

Redclyffe, though ashamed of himself, could not but feel a paltry confusion and embarrassment, as he thought of his unknown origin, and his advent from the almshouse; coming out of that squalid darkness as if he were a thing that had had a spontaneous birth out of poverty, meanness, petty crime; and here in ancestral England, he felt more keenly than ever before what was his misfortune.

"I must not let you lie under this impression," said he manfully to the Warden. "I have no ancestry; at the very first step my origin is lost in impenetrable obscurity. I only know that but for the aid of a kind friend--on whose benevolence I seem to have had no claim whatever--my life would probably have been poor, mean, unenlightened."

"Well, well," said the kind Warden,--hardly quite feeling, however, the noble sentiment which he expressed,--"it is better to be the first noble illustrator of a name than even the worthy heir of a name that has been noble and famous for a thousand years. The highest pride of some of our peers, who have won their rank by their own force, has been to point to the cottage whence they sprung. Your posterity, at all events, will have the advantage of you,--they will know their ancestor."

Redclyffe sighed, for there was truly a great deal of the foolish yearning for a connection with the past about him; his imagination had taken this turn, and the very circumstances of his obscure birth gave it a field to exercise itself.

"I advise you," said the Warden, by way of changing the conversation, "to look over the excellent history of the county which you are now in. There is no reading better, to my mind, than these country histories; though doubtless a stranger would hardly feel so much interest in them as one whose progenitors, male or female, have strewn their dust over the whole field of which the history treats. This history is a fine specimen of the kind."

The work to which Redclyffe's attention was thus drawn was in two large folio volumes, published about thirty years before, bound in calf by some famous artist in that line, illustrated with portraits and views of ruined castles, churches, cathedrals, the seats of nobility and gentry; Roman, British, and Saxon remains, painted windows, oak carvings, and so forth.

And as for its contents the author ascended for the history of the county as far as into the pre-Roman ages, before Caesar had ever heard of Britain; and brought it down, an ever swelling and increasing tale, to his own days; inclusive of the separate histories, and pedigrees, and hereditary legends, and incidents, of all the principal families. In this latter branch of information, indeed, the work seemed particularly full, and contained every incident that would have worked well into historical romance.