An Item Added to the Family Register
THAT first moment of renunciation and submission was followed by days of violent struggle in the millers mind, as the gradual access of bodily strength brought with it increasing ability to embra one view all the flig ditions under which he found himself. Feeble limbs easily resign themselves to be tethered, and when we are subdued by siess it seems possible to us to fulfil pledges which the old vigour es bad breaks. There were times when poor Tulliver thought the fulfilment of his promise to Bessy was something quite too hard for human nature: he had promised her without knowing what she was going to say - she might as well have asked him to carry a to on his back. But again, there were many feelings arguing on her side, besides the sehat life had been made hard to her by having married him. He saossibility, by much ping, of saving money out of his salary towards paying a sed dividend to his creditors, and it would not be easy elsewhere to get a situation such as he could fill. He had led an easy life, mud w little, and had no aptitude for any new business. He must perhaps take to day-labour, and his wife must have help from her sisters, a prospect doubly bitter to him, now they had let all Bessys precious things be sold, probably because they liked to set her against him, by making her feel that he had brought her to that pass. He listeo their admonitory talk, when they came te on him what he was bound to do for poor Bessys sake, with averted eyes, that every now and then flashed on them furtively when their backs were turned. Nothing but the dread of needing their help could have made it an easier alternative to take their advice. But the stro influence of all was the love of the old premises where he had run about when he was a boy, just as Tom had doer him. The Tullivers had lived on this spot feions, and he had sat listening on a low stool on winter evenings while his father talked of the old half-timbered mill that had been there before the last great floods, which damaged it so that his grandfather pulled it down and built the new o was whe able to walk about and look at all the old objects, that he felt the strain of this ging affe for the old home as part of his life, part of himself. He couldo think of himself living on any other spot than this, where he khe sound of every gate and door, ahat the shape and colour of every roof aher stain and broken hillock was good, because his growing senses had been fed on them. Our instructed vagrancy which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropid is at home with palms and banyans, - which is nourished on books of travel and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi hardly get a dim notion of what an old- fashioned man like Tulliver felt for this spot where all his memories tred and where life seemed like a familiar smooth-haool that the fingers clutch with loving ease. And just now he was living in that freshened memory of the far-off time whies to us in the passive hours of recovery from siess.
`Ay, Luke, he said, oernoon, as he stood looking over the orchard gate, `I remember the day they plahose apple trees. My father was a huge man for planting - it was like a merry-making to him to get a cart full o young trees - and I used to stand i the cold with him, and follow him about like a dog.
Theurned round, and, leaning against the gate post, looked at the opposite buildings.