"Ah! well, hem! This boy, in his mother's opinion--but that perhaps is
somewhat excusable--exhibited early indications of having been born a
"genius." Mrs. Armitage, who had been first struck by the beauty of the
child, gradually acquired the same notion; and the result was, that he
was little by little invested--with at least her tacit approval--with the
privileges supposed to be the lawful inheritance of such gifted spirits;
namely, the right to be as idle as he pleased--geniuses, you know, can,
according to the popular notion, attain any conceivable amount of
knowledge _per saltum_ at a bound--and to exalt himself in the stilts of
his own conceit above the useful and honorable pursuits suited to the
station in life in which Providence had cast his lot. The fruit of such
training soon showed itself. Young Bourdon grew up a conceited and
essentially-ignorant puppy, capable of nothing but bad verses, and
thoroughly impressed with but one important fact, which was, that he,
Alfred Bourdon, was the most gifted and the most ill-used of all God's
creatures. To genius, in any intelligible sense of the term, he has in
truth no pretension. He is endowed, however, with a kind of reflective
talent, which is often mistaken by fools for _creative_ power. The morbid
fancies and melancholy scorn of a Byron, for instance, such gentry
reflect back from their foggy imaginations in exaggerated and distorted
feebleness of whining versicles, and so on with other lights celestial
or infernal. This, however, by the way. The only rational pursuit he ever
followed, and that only by fits and starts, and to gratify his faculty of
"wonder," I fancy, was chemistry. A small laboratory was fitted up for
him in the little summer-house you may have observed at the further
corner of the lawn. This study of his, if study such desultory snatches
at science may be called, led him, in his examination of vegetable
bodies, to a smattering acquaintance with botany, a science of which
Ellen Armitage is an enthusiastic student. They were foolishly permitted
to _botanize_ together, and the result was, that Alfred Bourdon, acting