In the short film Rosetta, first screened at the 2013 Nakba and Return film festival organised by Zochrot, a dream-like sequence is showing a young keffiyehclad Palestinian girl walking along the Jaffa beach, among the ruins of Irshid (Arabic for Rosetta), a small neighbourhood that once stood just north of the clock tower square area. As the girl recovers a shard of an arabesque-style floor tile, she carefully wraps it in her keffiyeh, only to use it as the base for a small makeshift model of an Arab home, which she then leaves on a rock nearby.

The arabesque-style floor tiles are making a comeback these days. Home décor ‘experts’ trace their roots to mid-nineteenth century Europe, another commodity exported to the Middle East via merchants, diplomats and mercenaries that arrived to the region in droves as the Ottoman Empire was rapidly growing weaker and unable to resist these incursions. Today, although these tiles are in high demand, the geometrical and floral patterns are no more than mass-produced adhesives, custom designed to match the tastes of buyers, as much as they are made to mimic and resemble the famed ‘Jaffa style’ tiles (see Figure 5.1). Conversely, Jewish artisans settled in and around the old city of Jaffa, which serves as an ‘artist colony’, offer their own, high end, similar products for those who can afford them. Unlike the mimicry, the flooring tiles that adorned Jaffa's modern houses were hand-painted by local artisans, a craft that, against the claims of latter-day ‘experts’, has a long history in the Levant.

While the renewed interest in these ‘Jaffa tiles’ as a colonial and neolib-eral commodity attempts to strip them of their Arab history and rootedness in Palestine (and the region), the short film Rosetta reclaimed these tiles and reinscribed them into the history of Jaffa: unlike the mass-produced Israeli mimicry, the tiles in Rosetta tell a story of loss and trauma. Found in pieces, buried under the rubble of a demolished Palestinian neighbourhood, they are reclaimed as authentically Arab, wrapped in a keffiyeh, a symbol of resistance and steadfastness, and used to symbolically rebuild the homeland.

It would be wearisome to descant at any greater length on my weakliness, or of how the neighbours lamented that such a spunk o’ geni, as they spoke of me in their cracks, should remain an object for life. Some proposed one kind of infallible, and some another; and the minister's wife was every summer vehement in her prescriptions of the salt water at Fisherraw. But season after season came and passed;—the bud biggent and the blossom bloomed; the summer-nymph, with her growan een, walked away in the sunshine of the mountains; blithesome harvest laid down her apronful of sheaves at the barn-door; and the gaberloony winter arose from the chumly-lug, and hirpled o’er the hill;—but still no change came to me.

At last, one morning, a gang of tinklers, with smiddy bellows, and other implements for making horn-spoons, came to town; and there was among them a decent, gausy, conversible carlin, that could turn coats and shape gumashins, for which faculty she was feed to do a day's darg in my father's house. In this, which came out of a necessity on his part, there was a visible manifestation of Providence towards me. For Lucky A’things, as she was called, happened to cast a pitiful eye on me, as I was sitting by the fire-side, making a whistle of a willow-wand, and she began to discourse with my father concerning my complaints.

Well may I remember what she said, for she spoke with great rationality, and in a manner that was more like a graduate than a granny. I had not, indeed, until that time, heard or seen any sort of womankind possessed of such insight. Among the old women of the clachen, there were not wanting two or three who had gleaned in their time a few ears of experience.

Mrs. Musket, the widow of a serjeant who was slain at her side in the battle of Minden, was one of those, and it was allowed that her skill in bruises, visible hurts, and the cutted fingers of the shearers, would have made the fortune of an Edinbro’ doctor.

While the case studies examined in the preceding chapters have varied widely in the details of their respective national contexts, aesthetic issues, censorial challenges, market accessibility, political sensitivities, and critical appreciation, some overall significant cultural and historical patterns can be gleaned from examining them together. To do so is, naturally, to risk wading into the territory of top-down critical analysis, in which theories have been offered and examples have been selectively cherry-picked to support pre-determined theses. It is not my aim or intention to extrapolate an overly generalized monolithic definition of the complex relationships between cinematic innovation and social control from these few select examples, as doing so would risk engaging in a dramatic oversimplification of the various intersections between discourses of sex, violence, censorship, free expression, artistic experimentation, commercial distribution, and economic systems identified and engaged within them. However, in the interest of synthesizing a set of complicated processes for the purposes of shedding light on the cultural functions and histories of postmillennial cinematic transgression and the moral, legal, ethical, economic, and aesthetic questions that surround it, some measure of consolidation is perhaps useful.

If there is one concept that can potentially clarify the focus of the cross-national, trans-historical, multi-system comparison that this study comprises, it is perhaps most succinctly symbolized in the umbrella term classification. Throughout the preceding chapters, this notion has been employed, interrogated, and analyzed in several different ways. Yet its expansive reach as a concept is characterized chiefly by a remarkably consistent symbolic meaning and implication.

It is perhaps no surprise that classification has come to replace censorship as an essential tool in the lexicon of both critical and governmental discourses. Its versatility in this study alone suggests its importance as a cipher of cultural meaning. Classification can be many things in many different contexts. It is the mandated goal of contemporary review boards, whether governmental or industry initiated. It is the process by which “art” comes to be accredited as such. It is the primary toolkit of the cinema critic, commercial or academic. It is a conceit by which films are successfully marketed. It is a means of social control through labeling of deviance of subject matter, of approach, of cinematic gesture.

In the introduction to this collection, I outlined a series of difficulties that arise from the critical approach to gothic fiction that equates the ‘global’ with ‘globalisation’. In particular, I highlighted how the version of the world on which globalgothic has so far been predicated – one that sees old geopolitical hierarchies dissolved into dematerialised ‘flows’ (Byron 2013, 3) – appears increasingly implausible at our present moment, when uneven distributions of climate- and pandemic-related vulnerability are vividly exposing the racialised, gendered and geographical inequalities that have endured despite late-twentieth-century proclamations of a new world order. In fact, if globalgothic is understood as gothic that engages a novel transnational landscape of frictionless mobility and cultural exchange, then it may be the case, I suggested, that the term applies largely to fiction from certain deindustrialised (Northern) regions – places where the shape of society did indeed transform with the relocation of manufacturing to postcolonial nations across the Global South.

As it falls short, in this way, of the South's geohistorical experience, the globalisation theory of globalgothic may also obstruct critical routes into gothic's engagement with currently unfolding climate and cognate crises – a focus of gothic fiction to the existence of which many contributions in this volume attest. This impasse is visible in the register of culture, tradition and identity to which much globalgothic criticism has limited itself so far, and arises as a result of the presentism that underpins the identification of the late twentieth century as a new world order. Such a proposition only makes sense, as I argued with recourse to Andreas Malm (2018), through the erasure of a historical continuity, which consists in the persistence of those forms of material capitalist production supposedly superseded by the emergence of an ostensibly freefloating or spectralised late-twentieth-century market. The effacement of this history is simultaneously the effacement of global heating and the conditions that produce it, since these are inseparable precisely from the processes of extraction through which capital has always operated, into the present.

For a theory of gothic production that accounts, on the one hand, for contemporary gothic's real investment in questions and anxieties surrounding climate breakdown, and which is, on the other, truly global in scope, it is thus necessary to move beyond turn-of-the-millennium accounts of globalisation. In this coda, I reflect on two recent conceptions of ‘the planetary’ that make room for such a critical shift.

‘Canada emerged late from the Victorian period’, declared historian John Webster Grant about the 1960s. ‘And how!’ we might say, six decades later. From the time of Confederation in 1867, Canada was among the world's most observant Christian countries, whose national motto (‘From Sea to Sea’) came from the Bible and implied God's dominion over the land (Psalm 72: 8), and whose day-to-day life was shaped in large part by the Christian church year. Within a few decades of Canada's centennial celebration in 1967, it was fast becoming one of the most secular countries in the world.

Canada indeed emerged late from a millennium and more of European Christendom: the official – or all-but-official – sanctioning of Christianity as the religion of the state, nation and society. Michael Gauvreau has termed the era beginning around Confederation and lasting until the 1960s Canada's ‘evangelical century’, and the cultural dominance of Roman Catholicism in Francophone Canada paralleled the influence of observant Protestantism in the rest of the country. Over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, Canada went from being a country of colonists and native peoples who rarely, if ever, attended church to a country with one of the highest rates of regular churchgoing in the West. From the 1860s to the 1960s, two-thirds or more of Canadians attended church weekly, and the 1961 census recorded 96% of Canadians calling themselves Christians.

The largest religious bloc of Canadians, then and now, has been Roman Catholics: in Quebec overwhelmingly so, although in Anglophone Canada Catholic churches have maintained the nominal allegiance of about a third of the population. The Orthodox churches have made up 3–4% of the population. The Protestant sector used to take up the rest.

Canadian Protestantism has been constituted by two main groups: the four so-called mainline churches and then the congeries of groups known as Evangelicals. The two largest denominations have been the Anglican Church of Canada and the United Church of Canada (the latter formed in 1925 from an ecumenical combination of most Methodists, all the Congregationalists and roughly two-thirds of the Presbyterians). The remaining churches with a ‘state church’ heritage were the Presbyterians and Lutherans.

The tribulation into which I had thus brought myself gave my father a sore heart; and a ship, the Providence of New York,—happy name!—being then lying at Leith, taking passengers, he, to get me and my brother out of harm's way, paid for our passage by her, and after arranging with our bailsmen, sent us off to espouse our fortunes in America.

She was a very small vessel, and having on board above a hundred persons, crew and passengers, to describe all that befell us during the voyage, would, without other matter, fill a big book.

Before this time I had never been twenty miles from the house in which I was born, and save the summer I spent on the hills recovering my health, I had not been three nights from home. Here, in my twentieth year, was I, without having experienced or seen aught that could be said to be of the world, set as it were on my feet, close jammed in a crowd, from whom there was no retreating, whose ends, motives, and dispositions were as various as their faces. But even in this discomfort there was matter for thankfulness; our situation was such, that we could not indulge in reflection; our attention was distracted by the bustle around us; and I saw the hills of my home passing away without having time to breathe a sigh towards them.

It was a maxim and a saying of my worthy father, that young people ought to earn money before they begin to spend: and accordingly the outfit of my brother and myself, though we were well provided with necessaries, was yet, in the way of money, both of us thought, rather stinted.

After laying in for us a large chest (which had been an heir-loom for near a century) well filled with clothing, and a reasonable stock of such provisions as the ship did not furnish to steerage passengers, the old man with his parting benediction gave us twenty shillings for contingent expenses, after we might land in New York, and to support us until we should get into employment.

When we had finished our meal, the night being warm and close, I proposed that we should adjourn to the stoop—for by this time I had so far complied with the fashion, as to have a stoop or viranda along the front of my house. Mr. Hoskins, having lighted his cigar, joined us, dragging out the rocking-chair behind him, for he preferred it on all occasions while smoking in the stoop. The bailie took his seat on the bench beside me; and as soon as we were composedly arranged for conversation, he bent slightly forward, and laying his left hand on my right knee, he turned towards Mr. Hoskins, who was swinging on the chair a little in front, and said,—

“Gentlemen, I have a notion that in this contract with Mr. Bell, some o’ us have not had our wits so well gathered as was to have been desired on an occasion of such solemnity; in short, gentlemen, I have a doubt.”

“There can be no doubt of that,” replied I, jocularly; at the same time, by a glance he gave me, which I saw by the moonlight, I was persuaded he had something to ettle at me. “But what's this doubt about, bailie?”

“Ye see, gentlemen,” he resumed, “I’m no blaming you Mr. Hoskins, and every body knows well that Mr. Todd's never in the wrong.”

“Hem!” exclaimed the old man, whiffing out a long wreath of smoke, and spitting with an emphasis far beyond the railing of the stoop.

“I hope no offence,” continued the plague, “but really, Mr. Todd, you must just let a friend use a friend's freedom; I think we have been all fey in this affair. Ye see, Mr. Todd, I dinna give you all the wyte o’t, I take part of the blame to myself: I confess and allow that I am art and part.”

“I think, Mr. Waft,” said I, slightly disturbed, and wondering what was to be the upshot of such a preface—“I think, Mr. Waft, if you would tell us what ye mean first, we would then better know on whose shoulders the blame, if blame there be, should be laid. Can you, Mr. Hoskins, understand what he means?”

This book has emphasised the critical importance of honour in foundational liberal thought, explaining how a feudal propensity for social distinctions can preserve civic virtue within an emerging inward-looking liberal order. Chapters 1 and 2 examined the institutional and intellectual context of early eighteenth-century public and private finance in France to help illuminate the entry point to this important facet of Montesquieu's theory of moderation. His response to John Law's economic system in particular reveals a preoccupation with questions concerning the relationship between commerce and liberty, and the role of the nobility in market society (Chapter 1). In examining these themes, Montesquieu observed certain trends in eighteenth-century political economy which threatened to turn commerce into a handmaid of despotism: despite it being a source of political moderation, commerce itself needed to be moderated.

While Montesquieu appreciated the existing nobility's publicminded mores, he equally valued the increasing quality of life delivered by modern commerce. It is in this context that he revises James Harrington's republican project (Chapter 3). In a post– Financial Revolution climate, Harrington's republican vision was too utopian in its failure to recognise tangible commercial threats to political freedom. Eighteenth-century financial innovation may have helped stimulate commerce and reduce the public debt. However, it opened new avenues leading to political despotism, unidentifiable through a mid-seventeenth century lens. More specifically, the ‘monied interest’ threatened to supplant the principal source of France's political education, namely, the noblesse de robe, whose intermediary check on the sovereign was indispensable for France's liberty. John Law's System undermined France's intermediary bodies, threatening to eliminate the nobility's economic lifeline. Having considered these material circumstances, Montesquieu's theory of moderation proposes a modified republican vision suited to a modern commercial context.

To approximate republican virtue, a nation's institutions, manners and mores needed to correspond with the new commercial reality. Even though Montesquieu described both republics and monarchies as models of free, moderate government, in the face of financial innovation, he deemed the honour-loving archetype more viable for France and most of its continental European neighbours. In light of this realisation, his works are preoccupied with how legislators could harness existing monarchical institutions in a manner that allows a sense of personal honour to translate into genuine virtuous behaviour.

From the day of my marriage with Mrs. Greenknowe, whose name was Martha, all things went on comfortably. We left Chucky Stanes as soon as the ceremony was over, without regret on my part, but my wife shed a few natural tears. We travelled at our ease to London, sometimes taking a post-chaise, and sometimes a stage-coach; stopping where aught curious was to be seen, making a very pleasant jaunt of it.

In London we abode upwards of a month, and were so tired of seeing grand sights and fine things, that we both were glad when we left it. We then, being joined by my son, went to Liverpool, where we took our places in a packet-ship to New York, which for elegance cannot be described; and our voyage was as agreeable as it is possible for a voyage to be, by persons who were sea-sick nearly the whole way. I wonder how it happened, that although this was my third passage across the Atlantic, I was yet much worse than when I went the first time.

On our arrival at New York, I judged it prudent, on my son's account, to make our sojourn there as short as possible. Accordingly, as soon as Mrs. Todd had rested herself, and seen the curiosities, among which I showed her all my old places of abode, and where her predecessor Rebecca and I first fell in, we proceeded by the steam-boat to Albany, and thence, in the usual manner, to Utica, where I hired an extra to Judiville, to which a regular stage-coach, much to my delight, had been established during the summer.

Having written by post from New York on our arrival to Mr. Hoskins, Mr. Herbert, and my son Charles, when they might expect us; and having also sent forward Robin from Olympus, where we were obliged by fatigue to stop the last night; we found, next day, at Judiville, every thing had been prepared in good order for our reception; and greatly indeed was I surprised to see the progress which the town had made during the eight months of my absence.

In the mean time, the necessary preparations were going on for laying the foundation of Judiville, and roads were planned to open the tract assigned to me for settlement. The store was prospering exceedingly, so far beyond expectation, that both Mr. Hoskins and I had great reason to rejoice and be thankful; but I observed a curious change come upon his character, or rather a remarkable breaking out of nature, when he reflected at leisure on the advantageous bargain I had made with the agent for the twenty thousand acres.

I have told enough about the old man to show he was far from being avaricious, and certainly not envious; on the contrary, I have known few more disposed to help a friend; but he was jealous of being outdone in business, and when any apprehension of that sort came across his mind, he was apt to become obstinate and insensible to reasonable remonstrance. Thus, it so happened that he took it into his head I had schemed the agreement with the agent from the time he had told me of his design of locating a town between the two great water privileges of the river, and was making his speculation subservient to my own.

Nothing could be more unjust than this suspicion; for it was not until after he had agreed for the purchase of his land, that the agent made me the proposal to act as his sub at Babelmandel; and it was not until the proposal had been discussed at some length that the thought of contracting for the land entered my head. Moreover, it was not until at least ten days after our return home, when I happened to suggest that a bridle-path through the forest from the road leading to Olympus into his purchase would be beneficial to his speculation, that the idea took possession of his own fancy that I was making him an instrument for my own particular profit. It is true, the path would have laid open a considerable portion of my own pre-emption, and I should have been benefited in consequence, but I declare, on my conscience, I had no such view in offering the suggestion.

Medical Men are, as a class, very much too busy to take stock of singular situations or dramatic events. Thus it happens that the ablest chronicler of their experiences in our literature was a lawyer. A life spent in watching over death-beds—or over birth-beds which are infinitely more trying—takes something from a man's sense of proportion, as constant strong waters might corrupt his palate. The overstimulated nerve ceases to respond. Ask the surgeon for his best experiences and he may reply that he has seen little that is remarkable, or break away into the technical. But catch him some night when the fire has spurted up and his pipe is reeking, with a few of his brother practitioners for company and an artful question or allusion to set him going. Then you will get some raw, green facts new plucked from the tree of life.

It is after one of the quarterly dinners of the Midland Branch of the British Medical Association. Twenty coffee cups, a dozen liqueur glasses, and a solid bank of blue smoke which swirls slowly along the high, gilded ceiling gives a hint of a successful gathering. But the members have shredded off to their homes. The line of heavy, bulge-pocketed overcoats and of stethoscope-bearing top hats is gone from the hotel corridor. Round the fire in the sitting-room three medicos are still lingering, however, all smoking and arguing, while a fourth, who is a mere layman and young at that, sits back at the table. Under cover of an open journal he is writing furiously with a stylographic pen, asking a question in an innocent voice from time to time and so flickering up the conversation whenever it shows a tendency to wane.

The three men are all of that staid middle age which begins early and lasts late in the profession. They are none of them famous, yet each is of good repute, and a fair type of his particular branch. The portly man with the authoritative manner and the white, vitriol splash upon his cheek is Charley Manson, chief of the Wormley Asylum, and author of the brilliant monograph—‘Obscure Nervous Lesions in the Unmarried.’

True to her promise in the advertisement by which I had been enticed to become her tenant, Miss Beeny Needles lost no opportunity of procuring me hospitable attentions from the higher class of the inhabitants. On the Monday morning after the adventure of the amatory rustics, a card was brought from the Provost, inviting my son and me to dine with him on the Monday following. Before I had time to answer it, for I received it while at breakfast, Miss Beeny herself came to advise what should be done on the occasion. She did not tell me that such was the object of her visit: the pretext was, that in consequence of not seeing me at church in the afternoon, she was apprehensive I had taken cold; but the end of the errand came out before she retired.

Observing the card of invitation on the table, she said, “So, you have at last received one: well, better late than never. But such procrastination! I told Mrs. Badge, as we were coming last night from the evening rites, that it was a duty in all men of authority to make themselves attentive to strangers; and that it was thought you had not been treated with the circumspection and solicitude due to the fortune you had imported, and with which you might be conciliated to enliven the town. She has taken the hint, and the Provost has made at last an honourable capitulation. I hope you will accept their condescension; for I do assure you, that it is not every new incomer who is deemed amenable to be a receptacle of Provost Badge's hospitable assiduities.”

“Monday is far off,” replied I hesitatingly; “and three o’clock is not an hour for me to dine at;” meaning that it was later than my custom.

“Dear me!” exclaimed Miss Beeny, “it is not consistent either with their own station or the progress of knowledge, that you should be invited to dine at such a preternatural hour.

It is not necessary to inform the patient reader, who has proceeded so far with me, that up to the period of my visit to Scotland, I had but few opportunities of learning the etiquettes that make life genteel. He need not, therefore, be surprised to hear, that I felt myself often in an ill-fitted coat among the society to whom I had the honour of being introduced at Chucky Stanes by Miss Beeny Needles. In sooth to say, I was not fashioned, nor educated, nor connected for associating with fine folk; but my son being graceful, spirited, and gallant in his bearing, I considered it my duty to submit to many fasheries on his account, especially as, in the course of nature, he would come to a creditable inheritance.

But although I had not the advantages of dancing-school breeding, I had yet an eye in my head both for remark and comparison; by which I was enabled to discern, that banqueting was not the element of the gentry of that royal borough. The first assurance I had of this, was on the occasion of supping with Miss Beeny on the trouts, dressed as trouts of the Tweed should be.

She had every thing most genteel; fine white paper roses round the two tall candles, a stiffly starched tablecloth, glittering like satin, and rustling like silk;—and she proved better than her promise; for, in addition to the trouts, she had received in the course of the afternoon a brace of grouse, which emboldened her to invite two strangers to be of the party. This was a touch of the superior indeed! Four gentlemen all at once at supper, was a handling, the like of which Miss Beeny had not been engaged in since the death of her father, past Provost Needles.

Defining Evangelicalism as uniquely expressed in the context of North America presents an elusive task. The label applies varyingly in different settings as a political, social, ecclesial or theological term. North American Evangelicalism does not follow the typical rules of an institution with clear boundaries of membership, leadership and structure. However, despite the movement's amorphous nature, general agreement may be determined regarding key characteristics of Evangelicalism in North America, particularly in its US iteration. These characteristics have produced a vital movement and a self-conscious tradition but also provided a problematic label for application and study in the twenty-first century.

This essay offers a snapshot of the unique expression of the current iteration of US Evangelicalism (and its larger formation and impact in North America) that emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century. The early expressions of North American Evangelicalism stressed theological distinctives. However, the identity of the US Evangelical became more aligned with sociological categories than theological boundaries. The shift in more recent years has been the identification of US Evangelical as almost exclusively a political designation, moving beyond even the sociological categories. In this essay, I use the term ‘Evangelicalism’ with a capital ‘E’ to distinguish the particular and specific expression of Protestant Christianity that becomes a distinct movement in the latter part of the twentieth century in the USA from a small ‘e’ evangelicalism that defines a larger movement of theologically conservative Protestantism that spans several centuries.

Theological Boundaries

Evangelicals perceive themselves in the line of orthodoxy that traces back to biblical times. Evangelicals are the inheritors of orthodox Christianity from the chosen line evident in Genesis (Adam, Abel, Seth, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob), to the chosen nation of Israel (Moses, Joshua, David and the faithful prophets), to the new covenant community (the New Testament church) birthed in Acts 2, to the missionary efforts of the Apostle Paul, to the early church and its martyrs, to the empowered missionary activist church that succeeds the early church, to the faithful remnant in the context of the Roman captivity of the church, to the great Protestant Reformers proclaiming sola fide and sola Scriptura, to those who seek a pure faith on the canvas of a tabula rasa, to the chosen people seeking to establish a city set on a hill, to the experiencers of great revivals (exemplified by Whitefield, Edwards, Spurgeon and extending to Wesley and Finney), to the great missionaries of the great mission century, to the dynamic evangelists calling for personal conversion (Billy Graham) and finally to the faithful remnant who serve as cultural warriors in the midst of the collapse of Christendom.

Few days of my life have been fuller of vexation than the day of that hobbleshow in Chucky Stanes: I have ever since, in memory of what I suffered, called it the Black Wednesday.

On my return to the Hillocks, after the precognition at the provost’s, I felt myself much out of spirits, fatigued, and an all-overishness about me, as if I had been unwell; so I went and threw myself down on the sofa, the scene of the outrage, incapable of guiding my own thoughts.

I would have sent for my son, and explained to him the much ado about nothing; but, upon reflection, I thought it a subject he had better hear of from another. Sometimes my mind was inclined to abandon Chucky Stanes and Mrs. Greenknowe at once; then I recollected my two forlorn daughters, and how well that lady was calculated to be of the greatest service to them; and that, though on the near side of thirty, as concerned me, she was still a handsome young woman. Thus, my thoughts rising and falling like the sea-waves chafing a sandy shore, I lay ruminating for some time; at last I fell asleep.

When I was roused for dinner, there was a note from my son on the table, telling me he had gone to Kelso races with another young man; and that he would not be back before Saturday, when he hoped to find me well and comfortable. I had but little appetite, and this letter did not sharpen it: at first I was vexed that he had not told me of his intended excursion; but when I considered what had happened, I was obliged to acknowledge he had certainly acted judiciously in getting out of the way, and I wished I could have done the same. It showed me, however, what I had not thought of before, that the time was drawing near when he would probably be quitting his father's house altogether. This led me on to think that my other children, one after another, would be doing the same; and that the day was not very distant when I might find myself a lonely old man, in want of some such worthy companion as Mrs. Greenknowe, who, being younger, was the better able to take care of my old age.