Then they would sit down to supper in a black silence only broken by
an occasional twitter from one of the many cages that hung about the
room. But afterwards young Sam had his reward; the library, a toby,
long before he was old enough to smoke, and his grandfather reading
aloud in a wonderful voice, deep, sonorous, flexible--Shakespeare,
Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. To be sure, there was nothing
personal in such reading--it was not done to give pleasure to young
Sam. Every night the old man rumbled out the stately lines, sitting by
himself in this gloomy room walled to the ceiling with books, and
warmed by a soft-coal fire that snapped and bubbled behind the iron
bars of the grate. Sometimes he would burst into angry ecstasy at the
beauty of what he read "There! What do you think of that?"

"Oh, it's splendid!"

"Hah! Much you know about it! There is about as much poetry in your
family as there is in that coal scuttle."

It was when he was eighteen that once the old man let his grandson
read _The Tempest_ with him. It was a tremendous evening to Sam.
In the first place, his grandfather swore at him with a fury that
really attracted his attention. But that night the joy of the drama
suddenly possessed him. The deed was done; the dreaming youth awoke to
the passion of art. As Benjamin Wright gradually became aware of it
delight struggled with his customary anger at anything unexpected. He
longed to share his pleasure with somebody; once he mentioned to Dr.
Lavendar that "that cub, Sam, really has something to him!" After that
he took the boy's training seriously in hand, and his artless pride
concealed itself in a severity that knew no bounds of words. When Sam
confessed his wish to write a drama in blank verse, his grandfather