one other man who
kept as firm a silence; he had attended Parnell's last public meeting, and
after it sat alone beside him, and heard him speak of the followers that
had fallen away, or were showing their faint hearts; but Parnell was the
chief devotion of his life.

When I first began my visits, he had lived in the town itself, and close
to a disreputable neighbourhood called the Burrough, till one evening,
while he sat over his dinner, he heard a man and woman quarrelling under
his window. "I mind the time," shouted the man, "when I slept with you and
your daughter in the one bed." My uncle was horrified, and moved to a
little house about a quarter of a mile into the country, where he lived
with an old second-sighted servant, and a man-servant to look after the
racehorse that was browsing in the neighbouring field, with a donkey to
keep it company. His furniture had not been changed since he set up house
for himself as a very young man, and in a room opposite his dining-room
were the saddles of his youth, and though he would soon give up riding,
they would be oiled and the stirrups kept clean and bright till the day of
his death. Some love-affair had gone wrong when he was a very young man;
he had now no interest in women; certainly never sought favour of a woman,
and yet he took great care of his appearance. He did not let his beard
grow, though he had, or believed that he had, for he was hypochondriacal,
a sensitiveness of the skin that forced him to spend an hour in shaving,
and he would take to club and dumb-bell if his waist thickened by a hair's
breadth, and twenty years after, when a very old man, he had the erect
shapely figure of his youth. I often wondered why he went through so much
labour, for it was not pride, which had seemed histrionic in his eyes--and
certainly he had no vanity; and now, looking back, I am convinced that it
was from habit, mere habit, a habit formed when he was a young man, and
the best rider of his district.

Probably through long association with Mary Battle, the second-sighted
servant, he had come to believe much in the supernatural world, and would
tell how several times, arriving home with an unexpected guest, he had
found the table set for three, and that he himself had dreamed of his
brother's illness in Liverpool before he had other news of it. He saw me
using images learned from Mathers to start reverie, and, though I held out
for a long time, thinking him too old and habit-b