y which carried with it
none of the slighting estimations which usually accompany the term.
Andrew Winthrop, in truth, had been eccentric only in being more learned
and more original than his neighbors; perhaps, also, more severe. He was
a fair classical scholar, but a still better mathematician, and had
occupied himself at various times with astronomy; he had even built a
small observatory in the garden behind his house. But most of all was he
interested in the rapid advance of science in general, the advance all
along the line, which he had lived to see; he enjoyed this so much that
it was to him, during his later years, what a daily draught of the
finest wine is to an old connoisseur in vintages, whose strength is
beginning to fail him. He once said to his son: "The world is at last
getting into an intelligible condition. My only regret is that I could
not have lived in the century which is coming, instead of in the one
which is passing; but I ought not to complain, I have at least seen the
first rays. What should I have done if my lot had been cast among the
millions who lived before Darwin! I should either have become a
bacchanalian character, drowning in stupid drinking the memory of the
enigmas that oppressed me, or I should have fled to the opposite extreme
and taken refuge in superstition--given up my intellect, bound hand and
foot, to the care of the priests. The world has been in the wilderness,
Evert, through all the ages of which we have record; now a clearer
atmosphere is at hand. I shall not enter this promised land, but I can
see its shining afar off. You, my son, will enter in; prize your
advantages, they are greater than those enjoyed by the greatest kings,
the greatest philosophers, one hundred years ago."

This Puritan without a creed, this student of science who used more
readily than any other the language of the Bible, brought up his only
child with studied simplicity; in all that related to his education,
with severity. The little boy's mother had died soon after his birth,
and Andrew Winthrop had mourned for her, the young wife who had loved
him, all the rest of his life. But in silence, almost in sternness; he
did not welcome sympathy even when it came from his wife's only sister,
Mrs. Rutherford. And he would not give up the child, though the aunt had
begged that the poor baby might be intrusted to her for at least the
first year of his motherless life; the only concession he made was in
allow