BUSY INDOLENCE. 387 



pride have we dwelt, perhaps too diffusively, on thy rare 

 endowments. 



By the time that winter had melted into spring, a change, 

 apparent even to my youthful observation, appeared in the 

 person of my uncle, correspondent with the fallings off in his 

 restricted household and in habits also he was no less altered. 

 Indolence, like an ichneumon parasite plunging her fatal wea- 

 pon into her devoted prey, had beset him even in early life : 

 it had grown on affluence, and its victim was only lulled 

 into almost apathy by that adverse stroke, which might have 

 awakened some men from the destroyer's grasp. 



Although an indolent, my uncle had never been an idle 

 man ; he was generally busy about something busy after the 

 fashion of a caterpillar that should employ its whole maturity 

 in spinning nothing but a mass of mingled threads, loose and 

 irregular, intended for the support of a cocoon which, for want 

 of strength, it should never finish perhaps hardly begin. Yes, 

 my uncle used to be always busy busy in his garden, that 

 dear old-fashioned garden, with its long middle walk, broad 

 and straight, edged with thrift, flanked by flower-borders 

 such flower-borders ! their delicacy screened from vegetable 

 vulgarities by a fence of espalier fruit-trees, famed for their 

 produce throughout the village. There, attended usually by 

 me and Lucy, would he consume many a summer hour, ad- 

 miring or attending on his cherished plants ; watching, per- 

 haps, the labours of a carpenter wasp or bee, or the proceed- 



