a retired citizen's elysium.

The heads of the family were equally changed; my mother, unhappily, for
the worse. Her fine eyes beamed with joy as she threw herself upon my
neck, and murmured some of those mingled blessings and raptures which
have a language of their own. But when the first flush was past, I
perceived that the cheek was thin, the eye was hollow and heavy, and the
tremulous motion of her slight hand, as it lay in mine, alarmed me; in
all my ignorance of the frailty of the human frame. But the grand change
was in the Earl. My father, whom I had left rather degenerating into the
shape which three courses and a bottle of claret a-day inflict on
country gentlemen "who live at home at ease," was now braced and laced,
costumed in the newest fashion, and overflowing with exuberant
volatility. He breathed of Bond Street. He welcomed me with an ardour
which astonished, more than delighted, me; Talked fragments of French,
congratulated me on my "_air distingué_," advised me to put myself "_en
grande tenue_;" and, after enchanting me in all kinds of strange ways,
concluded by making an attempt to kiss me on both cheeks, like a true
Frenchman. My Eton recollections enabled me to resist the paternal
embrace; until the wonder was simplified, by the discovery that the
family had but just returned from a continental residence of a couple of
years--a matter of which no letter or word had given me the knowledge at
my school. My next discovery was, that an old uncle had died, and left
us money enough to carry the county; and the last and crowning one was,
that my eldest brother had just been returned for the North Riding.

This was such an accumulation of good-luck as might have thrown any
elderly gentleman off the balance of his gravity. It was like Philip's
three plates at the Greek horse-races, crowned by the birth of
Alexander. If my lordly father had danced the "Minuette de la Cour" over