haunt--or
standing in the doorway and drawing himself painfully erect, a giant
of a man, to inhale the scent of his flowers or listen to his bees,
or the voice of the stream which bounded our small domain. I see him
framed there, his head almost touching the lintel, his hands gripping
the posts like a blind Samson's, all too strong for the flimsy
trelliswork. He wore a brown holland suit in summer, in colder
weather a fustian one of like colour, and at first glance you might
mistake him for a Quaker. His snow-white hair was gathered close
beside the temples, back from a face of ineffable simplicity and
goodness--the face of a man at peace with God and all the world, yet
marked with scars--scars of bygone passions, cross-hatched and almost
effaced by deeper scars of calamity. As Miss Plinlimmon wrote in her
album--

"Few men so deep as Major Brooks
Have drained affliction's cup.
Alas! if one may trust his looks,
I fear he's breaking up!"

This Miss Plinlimmon, a maiden aunt of the young officer who had been
slain at Badajoz, kept house for us after my sister's death. She was
a lady of good Welsh family, who after many years of genteel poverty
had come into a legacy of seven thousand pounds from an East Indian
uncle; and my father--a simple liver, content with his half-pay--had
much ado in his blindness to keep watch and war upon the luxuries she
untiringly strove to smuggle upon him. For the rest, Miss Plinlimmon
wore corkscrew curls, talked sentimentally, worshipped the manly form
(in the abstract) with the manly virtues, and possessed (quite
unknown to herself) the heart of a lion.

Upon this unsuspected courage, and upon the strength of her affection
for me, she had drawn on the day when she stood up to my father--of
whom, by the way, she was desperately afraid--and told him that his
neglect of me was a sin and a shame and a scandal. "And a good
education," she wound up feebly, "would render Harry so much more of
a companion to you."

My father rubbed his head vaguely. "Yes, yes, you are right. I have
been neglecting the boy. But pray end as honestly as you began, and
do not pretend to be consulting my future when you are really
pleading for his. To begin with, I don't want a companion; next, I
should not immediately make a companion of Harry by sending him away
to school; and, lastly, you know as well as I, that long before he
finished his schooling I should be in my grav