And yet, how out of thorns spring roses, and out of troubles virtues come into bloom! Never, probably, in our whole career did charity, the bond of all virtues, so luxuriate, throw out such all-embracing tendrils, emit such fragrance, ripen into such fruit, as on the occasion of change of quarters. Old boots, slightly damaged bonnets, heavy battered pieces of furniture, for which a dealer would not give sixpence; articles that would fetch nothing in a sale, antiquated school-books, magazines five years old, novels that have lost their backs, games, deficient in one or two pieces, odd gloves, iron bedsteads minus their brass knobs, and that have to be tied together with wire; cracked dishes, snipped tumblers, saucepans corroded with rust—with what lavish and lordly magnificence we distribute them to all who will accept such alms.
And then—what a lesson does change of quarters teach us, to discriminate between the worthless and the valuable; and with equanimity to endure separation from things which have become interesting to us, but which we cannot remove. When the author was a boy, his life was spent in travelling on the Continent; in rambles from the Pyrenees to the plains of Hungary, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, and wherever he went, he made collections of objects of curiosity, crystals, petrifactions, dried flowers, butterflies, mediæval armour, books. Before quitting any place of sojourn for a winter, or halt for a night, his father explored every pocket and crevice of the carriage, and turned out the treasures there secreted, on which his son’s heart were set and his pocket-money had been expended.
Nothing escaped his eye, nothing melted his heart. The author came to a place bringing nothing with him, and left it, carrying nothing with him away, all he acquired he was forced to leave. It was an excellent discipline for life, and yet hardly attained; even to this day he finds that he clings to trifles.
How many times since boyhood has he had to shift quarters? and each time he has experienced a struggle, and has had to surrender some things on which his heart was fixed, but from which it was, perhaps, well to be free. He recalls how one winter at Bayonne, he collected every match and spill-end that had been used for lighting cigars and candles till he had accumulated a trunk full. When, in spring, the move came, his father peremptorily refused to despatch this trunk-load of scorched paper scraps by _grande_ or _petite vitesse_ to Vienna, and they were consigned to the flames. When he was in Yorkshire, he had collected some prehistoric querns, stone hand-mills. When he contracted with a furniture-mover to translate his goods to the south of England, the man struck at the mill-stones, they were not in his bond. The author had to resign them; but his heart aches for those stones to this day.