and keep some sort of a shelter for them. In his unselfish devotion to
them his character was noble. In his harsh cynicism toward the world
and especially the church people, for whom he had no charity whatever
--in his utter hatred and detestation of his father--it was faulty,
though allowance must be made for him. He was also peculiar in other
respects, for his unguided reading was of a nature that fed his
imagination at the expense of his reasoning faculties. Though he
drudged in a narrow round, and his life was as hard and real as
poverty and his father's intemperance could make it, he mentally lived
and found his solace in a world as large and unreal as an uncurbed
fancy could create. Therefore his work was hurried through
mechanically in the old slovenly methods to which he had been
educated, he caring little for the results, as his father squandered
these; and when the necessary toil was over, he would lose all sense
of the sordid present in the pages of some book obtained from the
village library. As he drove his milk cart to and from town he would
sit in the chill drizzling rain, utterly oblivious of discomfort, with
a half smile upon his lips, as he pictured to himself some scene of
sunny aspect or gloomy castellated grandeur of which his own
imagination was the architect. The famous in history, the heroes and
heroines of fiction, and especially the characters of Shakespeare were
more familiar to him than the people among whom he lived. From the
latter he stood more and more aloof, while with the former he held
constant intercourse. He had little in common even with his sister,
who was of a very different temperament. But his tenderness toward his
mother never failed, and she loved him with the passionate intensity
of a nature to which love was all, but which had found little to
satisfy it on earth, and was ignorant of the love of God.

And so the years dragged on to Arden, and hiss twenty-first birthday