, as snug as if they
had lived there all their lives and never meant to go away! The thing
was a mystery; it went near to being a scandal. For a final touch, Crump
assured me that these precious gentry were all but nameless; no one had
ever heard the woman called anything, and the man's name defied
pronunciation.

Upon all this agreeable intelligence, we parted, as Crump's way was by
the round-about hill road, while I struck straight across by short cuts
to my grandfathers house. If I had been content to loiter on the path
heretofore, no amount of haste could satisfy me now. I doubt if any
honest artist lad returning to the place of his birth after three years'
absence ever met a grayer welcome. I had left my grandfather unimpaired,
and it was well-nigh impossible to figure that harsh and domineering
spirit in decay. Abram Pendarves belonged to the ancient hearty, savage
race of British sea-captains, now fast waning to extinction. After a
youth of wild and black adventure under the rule of just such salt-water
despots as he himself became, he had spent some two score years
practising the tyrannies and what one may call the brutal virtues he had
learned on every sea and beneath every sky this planet owns; then came
at last to settle down in the storm-beaten house on the cliffs by
Chepstow (the house his father's father had built), whence he could see
the surf whiten on the rocks and gulls forever circling about the Brown
Cow. His was a narrow and surly old age, not overwell provided, for he
had never been a thrifty man; and he found among the rattletrap
furnishings of his neglected home one living chattel quite as
worthless--a weird, lean goblin of a boy, his sole descendant,
fatherless and motherless, playing lonely little games in corners,
making crass drawings with a charred stick on the walls, and viewing the
blossoming orchards of spring with a crazy delight in color. I fear
there was not much affection between this ill-matched couple. For long
years I saw in my grandfather only a coarse, violent old man, niggardly
and censorious. And to him there was doubtless something unwholesome
and repellent in the most innocent of my tastes; I could not even sin
roundly, like other boys, by pilfering or truantry, but must display an
exotic passion for reading forbidden books, an abhorred dexterity at
caricature. I think we were equally headstrong and unreasonable, I in my
young way, he in his old one; and as I trudged along th