Young master wore a coronet of bluebells on his golden bead, young miss
a wreath of cowslips on her ebon locks. The pair were flowers, cherubs,
children--everything that stands for young, tender, and lovely.
The honest villagers gaped, and roared in chorus, and held high their
torches, and gazed with reverential delight. Not for them was it to
finger the little gentlefolks, but only to devour them with admiring
eyes.
Indeed, the picture was carried home to many a humble hearth, and is
spoken of to this day in Huntercombe village.
But the pale and anxious fathers were in no state to see pictures--they
only saw their children Sir Charles and Richard Bassett came round with
the general rush, saw, and dashed into the pit.
Strange to say, neither knew the other was there. Each seized his
child, and tore it away from the contact of the other child, as if from
a viper; in which natural but harsh act they saw each other for the
first time, and their eyes gleamed in a moment with hate and defiance
over their loving children.
Here was a picture of a different kind, and if the melancholy Jaques,
or any other gentleman with a foible for thinking in a wood; had been
there, methinks he had moralized very prettily on the hideousness of
hate and the beauty of the sentiment it had interrupted so fiercely.
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