Nothing New Author:Dinah Maria Mulock Craik Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. Business kept me in Liverpool for three weeks, without intermission. My father could only find time to go down once to Lythwaite for a day and a n... more »ight. The incessant burden and responsibility of money-making, money- turning, and money-spending—the cruel slavery of riches—sometimes weighed heavily upon even his stout heart. " O, Mark," he would sometimes say to me, when we were laying our heads together over business matters in the small parlour, until long after office-hours—" I sometimes think I'd ha' done better to ha' left thee a clerk, as I was myself when thee wert a bit of a lad, going back'ards and for'ards twixt this and the little house at Everton. Heigho, my boy ! I hope thee'll get more good than thy father gets out of Lythwaite Hall." It did sometimes seem to me strange, that he and I, working here, in this musty room, under the coarse flare of gas-light— sometimes lifting our eyes from the mass of papers and mazes of figures, to exchange a word or two, then again silence—it seemed passing strange that he and I should have any part or lot in the splendours of Lythwaite Hall. For its splendours, they might go to the winds, but then it had some sweetnesses too. Every Sunday, that being the only day I had time to let them come, I used to be haunted by wafts from the May-hedges, by the sound of rooks cawing, or the soft single twitter of young thrushes going to sleep in the rustling trees. On Monday when my father came back, I asked him if all were going on well at home? " All well, and particularly quiet; your mother," with a twinkle of his keen eye, " your poor dear mother has quite given up telling folk how very much she misses Lord Erlistoun." He was gone then, safe and sure. Well, Vol. i. v let him go, and prosperity go with him....« less