And eventually Florence was fixed on.
As for my mother, it turned out that she was then selecting her last and final home--though the end was not, thank God, for many a long year yet.

As for me, the decision arrived at during those walks on Exeter Northernhay, was more momentous still.

For I was choosing the road that led not only to my home for the next half century nearly, but to two marriages, both of them so happy in all respects as rarely to have fallen to the lot of one and the same man! How little we either of us, my mother and I, saw into the future--beyond a few immediate inches before our noses! Truly _prudens futuri temporis exitum caliginosa nocte premit Deus!_ And when I hear talk of "conduct making fate," I often think--humbly and gratefully, I trust; marvelling, certainly,--how far it could have _a priori_ seemed probable, that the conduct of a man who, without either _oes in presenti_, or any very visible prospect of _oes in futuro_, turns aside from all the beaten paths of professional industry should have led him to a long life of happiness and content, hardly to be surpassed, and, I should fear, rarely equalled.

_Deus nobis haec otia fecit!--Deus_, by the intromission of one rarely good mother, and two rarely good, and I may add rarely gifted, wives! Not that I would have the reader translate "_otia_" by idleness.

I have written enough to show that my life hitherto had been a full and active one.