Clara Hopgood

The Marshall family included Marshall and his wife. He was rather a

small man, with blackish hair, small lips, and with a nose just a

little turned up at the tip. As we have been informed, he was a

cabinet-maker. He worked for very good shops, and earned about two

pounds a week. He read books, but he did not know their value, and

often fancied he had made a great discovery on a bookstall of an

author long ago superseded and worthless. He belonged to a

mechanic's institute, and was fond of animal physiology; heard

courses of lectures on it at the institute, and had studied two or

three elementary handbooks. He found in a second-hand dealer's shop

a model, which could be taken to pieces, of the inside of the human

body. He had also bought a diagram of a man, showing the

circulation, and this he had hung in his bedroom, his mother-in-law

objecting most strongly on the ground that its effect on his wife was

injurious. He had a notion that the world might be regenerated if

men and women were properly instructed in physiological science, and

if before marriage they would study their own physical peculiarities,

and those of their intended partners. The crossing of peculiarities

nevertheless presented difficulties. A man with long legs surely

ought to choose a woman with short legs, but if a man who was

mathematical married a woman who was mathematical, the result might

be a mathematical prodigy. On the other hand the parents of the

prodigy might each have corresponding qualities, which, mixed with

the mathematical tendency, would completely nullify it. The path of

duty therefore was by no means plain. However, Marshall was sure

that great cities dwarfed their inhabitants, and as he himself was

not so tall as his father, and, moreover, suffered from bad

digestion, and had a tendency to 'run to head,' he determined to

select as his wife a 'daughter of the soil,' to use his own phrase,

above the average height, with a vigorous constitution and plenty of

common sense. She need not be bookish, 'he could supply all that

himself.' Accordingly, he married Sarah Caffyn. His mother and Mrs

Caffyn had been early friends. He was not mistaken in Sarah. She

was certainly robust; she was a shrewd housekeeper, and she never

read anything, except now and then a paragraph or two in the weekly

newspaper, notwithstanding (for there were no children), time hung

rather heavily on her hands. One child had been born, but to

Marshall's surprise and disappointment it was a poor, rickety thing,

and died before it was a twelvemonth old.