it open, so little
intercourse was maintained between the cottage and the world, whose
frontier lay about a mile off. A widow and her son, with one servant,
were the occupants. It had been a fishing-lodge of her husband's in
more prosperous days. His memory and the cheapness of life in the
neighborhood had decided her in choosing it, lonely and secluded as it
was; and here she had passed fourteen years, her whole care being the
education of her boy, a task to which she addressed herself with all the
zeal and devotion of her nature. There was, it is true, a village school
at Ballintray, about three miles off, to which he went in summer; but
when the dark short days of winter set in with swooping storms of rain
and wind, she held him, so far as she could, close prisoner, and pored
with him over tasks to the full as difficult to herself as to him.
So far as a fine, open-hearted, generous disposition, truthful and
straightforward, could make him, he repaid all the love and affection
she could bear him. He was well-grown, good-looking, and brave. There
was scarcely an exercise of which he was not master; and whether in the
saddle over a stiff country, or on the thwart of a boat in a stormy
sea, Tony Butler could hold his own against all competitors. The leap
of twenty feet four inches he had made on the level sward was one of
the show objects of the village, and the place where he had pitched a
fourteen-pound sledge to the top of a cliff was marked by a stone with
a rude attempt at an inscription. Fortunate was he if these were enough
for glory, for his gifts scarcely rose to higher things. He was not
clever, nor was he very teachable; his apprehension was not quick, and
his memory was bad. The same scatterbrained forgetfulness that he had in
little things attended him in more serious ones. Whenever his intellect
was called on for a great effort he was sure to be vanquished, and he
would sit for hours before an open book as hopeless of mastering it as
though the volume were close-clasped and locked before him. Dull men are
not generally alive to their own dulness; but Tony was,--he saw and felt
it very bitterly. He thought, it is true, that there ought to be a
way to his intellect, if it could only be discovered, but he owned to
himself he had not found it; and, with some lingering hope of it, he
would carry his books to his room and sit down to them with a resolute
heart, and ponder and puzzle and wonder, till he either fell