"Vivis gemma tumescit aquis."

E. B. L.

October, 1849.




THE CAXTONS.


PART I.




CHAPTER I.

"Sir--sir, it is a boy!"

"A boy," said my father, looking up from his book, and evidently much
puzzled: "what is a boy?"

Now my father did not mean by that interrogatory to challenge
philosophical inquiry, nor to demand of the honest but unenlightened
woman who had just rushed into his study, a solution of that mystery,
physiological and psychological, which has puzzled so many curious
sages, and lies still involved in the question, "What is man?" For as
we need not look further than Dr. Johnson's Dictionary to know that a