congenial to his stately temper in one divided from him by an utter
absence of education and by the strong, but nameless, distinctions of
national views and manners. The disappointment probably, however, went
deeper than that which usually attends an ill-assorted union; for
instead of bringing his wife to his old Tower (an expatriation which she
would doubtless have resisted to the utmost), he accepted, maimed as he
was, not very long after his return to Spain, the offer of a military
post under Ferdinand. The Cavalier doctrines and intense loyalty of
Roland attached him, without reflection, to the service of a throne
which the English arms had contributed to establish; while the extreme
unpopularity of the Constitutional Party in Spain, and the stigma of
irreligion fixed to it by the priests, aided to foster Roland's belief
that he was supporting a beloved king against the professors of those
revolutionary and Jacobinical doctrines which to him were the very
atheism of politics. The experience of a few years in the service of a
bigot so contemptible as Ferdinand, whose highest object of patriotism
was the restoration of the Inquisition, added another disappointment to
those which had already embittered the life of a man who had seen in the
grand hero of Cervantes no follies to satirize, but high virtues to
imitate. Poor Quixote himself,--he came mournfully back to his La
Mancha with no other reward for his knight-errantry than a decoration,
which he disdained to place beside his simple Waterloo medal, and a
grade for which he would have blushed to resign his more modest, but
more honorable, English dignity.

But still weaving hopes, the sanguine man returned to his Penates. His
child now had grown from infancy into boyhood,--the child would pass
naturally into his care. Delightful occupation! At the thought, home
smiled again.