to either of these criticisms, which seemed indeed to affect him very
little--if he even listened to them. For he was a man of singularly
imperfect moral culture; insomuch that nothing else was so remarkable
about him as that--possessing a good deal of intellectual ability, made
available by much reading and experience--he was so very dark on the
moral side; as if he needed the natural perceptions that should have
enabled him to acquire that better wisdom. Such a phenomenon often
meets us in life; oftener than we recognize, because a certain tact and
exterior decency generally hide the moral deficiency. But often there
is a mind well polished, married to a conscience and natural impulses
left as they were in childhood, except that they have sprouted up into
evil and poisonous weeds, richly blossoming with strong-smelling
flowers, or seeds which the plant scatters by a sort of impulse; even
as the Doctor was now half-consciously throwing seeds of his evil
passions into the minds of these children. He was himself a grown-up
child, without tact, simplicity, and innocence, and with ripened evil,
all the ranker for a native heat that was in him and still active,
which might have nourished good things as well as evil. Indeed, it did
cherish by chance a root or two of good, the fragrance of which was
sometimes perceptible among all this rank growth of poisonous weeds. A
grown-up child he was,--that was all.

The Doctor now went on to describe an old country-seat, which stood
near this village and the ancient Hospital that he had been telling
about, and which was formerly the residence of the wicked man (a knight
and a brave one, well known in the Lancastrian wars) who had founded
the latter. It was a venerable old mansion, which a Saxon Thane had
begun to build more than a thousand years ago, the old English oak that
he built into the frame being still visible in the ancient skeleton of
its roof, sturdy and strong as if put up yesterday. And the descendants