see thy mind turning towards business. I trust, should better health
be vouchsafed thee, that some day soon--"

"Not just yet, father," said I, sadly--for I knew what he referred
to, and that it would never be. Mentally and physically I alike
revolted from my father's trade. I held the tan-yard in abhorrence--
to enter it made me ill for days; sometimes for months and months I
never went near it. That I should ever be what was my poor father's
one desire, his assistant and successor in his business, was, I knew,
a thing totally impossible.

It hurt me a little that my project of going with him to-day should
in any way have deceived him; and rather silently and drearily we set
out together; progressing through Norton Bury streets in our old way,
my father marching along in his grave fashion, I steering my little
carriage, and keeping as close as I could beside him. Many a person
looked at us as we passed; almost everybody knew us, but few, even of
our own neighbours, saluted us; we were Nonconformists and Quakers.

I had never been in the town since the day I came through it with
John Halifax. The season was much later now, but it was quite warm
still in the sunshine, and very pleasant looked the streets, even the
close, narrow streets of Norton Bury. I beg its pardon; antiquaries
hold it a most "interesting and remarkable" place: and I myself have
sometimes admired its quaint, overhanging, ornamented house-fronts--
blackened, and wonderfully old. But one rarely notices what has been
familiar throughout life; and now I was less struck by the beauty of
the picturesque old town than by the muddiness of its pathways, and
the mingled noises of murmuring looms, scolding women, and squabbling
children, that came up from the alleys which lay between the High