festal
occasions, and to the grief of the neighbouring farmers he made it pay.
Sport of all kinds attracted him, and on Saturdays in the autumn and
winter he would bring down partridges and pheasants with remarkable
certainty, but he was sufficiently logical not to cap his battues by
going to church on the following day. He made friends with everybody
and was criticised by the squires for being a rebel and by the rebels,
of whom the village had two, for being a squire. This amused him
intensely and his first answer to all criticism was a drink. Then he
would start out magnificently to justify his position. "I get the best
of everything," he said, and meant it.

Martin, of course, missed his father's companionship: they had lived on
very intimate terms and the customary limitations of the parental
relationship had been broken through. But it is the privilege of youth
to forget easily, and it was fortunate for Martin that almost directly
after his father's death he should have been plunged into a new world,
a world whose thronging cares and pleasures gave few moments for
reflection. By the time he had returned to The Steading his
personality had so grown and developed that he was freed from painful
memories and able to enjoy his holidays.

The Berrisfords were people of sound sense, and seeing what manner of
boy he was made no effort to entertain him. Robert, the son at Rugby,
was seventeen and a prefect, so that Martin was afraid of him and kept
aloof: of Margaret, as a girl, he was naturally shy. He preferred to
wander alone in the fields and coverts, now marking the ways of bird
and beast, now plotting out his future and building up strange
fantasies of thought. Ever since he had been a tiny boy he had played
with himself a game of imagination in which he fused his personality
with that of a mysterious hero called Daniel. Always when he got into
bed he would become Daniel until he fell asleep and in imagination he
would go through great adventures and sufferings and triumphs. Daniel
was very strong and brave and perfect: perhaps Martin had been
influenced by Henty's heroes. Daniel's life varied with Martin's own
vicissitudes. When Martin read Ballantyne, Daniel was the son of a
trapper and wrought wonderful deeds among the Esquimaux and Redskins on
the shores of Hudson's Bay: when Martin was under his father's
influence he abandoned trapping and came home to write wonderful books
about grizzly bears: whe