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Chapter XXXVIII
Kit - for it happens at this juncture, not only that we have breathing
time to follow his fortunes, but that the necessities of these
adventures so adapt themselves to our ease and inclination as to call
upon us imperatively to pursue the track we most desire to take - Kit,
while the matters treated of in the last fifteen chapters were yet in
progress, was, as the reader may suppose, gradually familiarising
himself more and more with Mr and Mrs Garland, Mr Abel, the pony,
and Barbara, and gradually coming to consider them one and all as
his particular private friends, and Abel Cottage, Finchley, as his own
proper home.
Stay - the words are written, and may go, but if they convey any
notion that Kit, in the plentiful board and comfortable lodging of his
new abode, began to think slightingly of the poor fare and furniture of
his old dwelling, they do their office badly and commit injustice. Who
so mindful of those he left at home - albeit they were but a mother
and two young babies - as Kit? What boastful father in the fulness of
his heart ever related such wonders of his infant prodigy, as Kit never
wearied of telling Barbara in the evening time, concerning little Jacob?
Was there ever such a mother as Kit's mother, on her son's showing;
or was there ever such comfort in poverty as in the poverty of Kit's
family, if any correct judgment might be arrived at, from his own
glowing account!
And let me linger in this place, for an instant, to remark that if ever
household affections and loves are graceful things, they are graceful in
the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy and the proud to home may
be forged on earth, but those which link the poor man to his humble
hearth are of the truer metal and bear the stamp of Heaven. The man
of high descent may love the halls and lands of his inheritance as part
of himself: as trophies of his birth and power; his associations with
them are associations of pride and wealth and triumph; the poor
man's attachment to the tenements he holds, which strangers have
held before, and may to-morrow occupy again, has a worthier root,
struck deep into a purer soil. His household gods are of flesh and
blood, with no alloy of silver, gold, or precious stone; he has no
property but in the affections of his own heart; and when they endear
bare floors and walls, despite of rags and toil and scanty fare, that
man has his love of home from God, and his rude hut becomes a
solemn place.
Oh! if those who rule the destinies of nations would but remember
this - if they would but think how hard it is for the very poor to have
engendered in their hearts, that love of home from which all domestic
virtues spring, when they live in dense and squalid masses where
social decency is lost, or rather never found - if they would but turn
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