a parish pulpit, or taught in a parish school. The intellect of the man
was as clear as running water in all things not appertaining to his
daily life, and its difficulties. He could be logical with a
vengeance--so logical as to cause infinite trouble to his wife, who,
with all her good sense, was not logical. And he had Greek at his
fingers' ends--as his daughter very well knew. And even to this day he
would sometimes recite to them English poetry, lines after lines,
stanzas upon stanzas, in a sweet low melancholy voice, on long winter
evenings when occasionally the burden of his troubles would be lighter
to him than was usual. Books in Latin and in French he read with as much
ease as in English, and took delight in such as came to him, when he
would condescend to accept such loans from the deanery. And there was at
times a lightness of heart about the man. In the course of the last
winter he had translated into Greek irregular verse the very noble
ballad of Lord Bateman, maintaining the rhythm and the rhyme, and had
repeated it with uncouth glee till his daughter knew it all by heart.
And when there had come to him a five-pound note from some admiring
magazine editor as the price of the same--still through the dean's
hands--he had brightened up his heart and had thought for an hour or two
that even yet the world would smile upon him. His wife knew well that he
was not mad; but yet she knew that there were dark moments with him, in
which his mind was so much astray that he could not justly be called to
account as to what he might remember and what he might forget. How would
it be possible to explain all this to a judge and jury, so that they
might neither say that he was dishonest, nor yet that he was mad?

'Perhaps he picked it up, and had forgotten,' her daughter said to her.
Perhaps it was so, but she might not as yet admit as much even to her
child.