ld of nature, for at all hours of the day, when it was
possible to slip out of doors, he went his solitary way, looking,
looking; until every tree and flower-border and thicket of the small
domain became so sharply imprinted upon the mind that, years after, he
could walk in memory through the sunny garden, and recall the minutest
details with an astonishing accuracy.

But books became for the child a large part of his life. It was a
story that he desired, something that should create a scene for him,
personalities like or unlike his own, whose deeds and words he could
survey, leaning, so it seemed to him, from a magic casement into the
new scene. His father, whose taste was for the improving in
literature, was willing enough that the boy should be supplied with
books, but hardly understood that the child was living in a world of
bright fancies and simple dreams. His father, moreover, who had all
his life had a harder and more definite turn of thought, and had
desired knowledge of a precise kind, wanted the boy to read the little
dry books, uncouthly and elaborately phrased, that had pleased himself
in his own early days. Hugh's mind was precise enough; but these terse
biographies, these books of travel, these semi-scientific stories
seemed to Hugh only to relate the things that he did not want to know.
His father had been born at a time when the interest in the education
of children was first taking shape, the days of Miss Edgeworth's
_Frank_, and _Harry and Lucy_, that strange atmosphere of gravity and
piety, when children were looked upon as a serious responsibility more
than as a poetical accessory to life; not as mysterious and fairy-like
creatures, to be delicately wooed and tenderly guided, but rather as
little men and women, to be repressed and trained, and made as soon as
possible to have a sense of responsibility too. Hugh used to look at
the old books in later days, and wonder what the exact social position
of the parents in such books as _Frank_, and _Harry and Lucy_, were
supposed to be. They lived in the country; they were not apparently
wealthy; they lived with much simplicity. Yet Harry's father seemed to
have nothing to do but to conduct his children over manufactories, and
to take them long walks--in the course of which he diligently improved
their minds by a species of Socratic inquiry. But Hugh never thought
of quarrelling with the books provided; he seized upon any trace of
humanity or amusem