touched till now, and that sometimes made a sweet, high music. But this
was rarely; and as far as the general duties of an instructor went,
they did not seem to be very successfully performed. Something was
cultivated; the spiritual germ grew, it might be; but the children, and
especially Ned, were intuitively conscious of a certain want of
substance in the instructor,--a something of earthly bulk; a too
etherealness. But his connection with our story does not lie in any
excellence, or lack of excellence, that he showed as an instructor, and
we merely mention these things as illustrating more or less his
characteristics.

The grim Doctor's curiosity was somewhat piqued by what he could see of
the schoolmaster's character, and he was desirous of finding out what
sort of a life such a man could have led in a world which he himself
had found so rough a one; through what difficulties he had reached
middle age without absolutely vanishing away in his contact with more
positive substances than himself; how the world had given him a
subsistence, if indeed he recognized anything more dense than
fragrance, like a certain people whom Pliny mentioned in Africa,--a
point, in fact, which the grim Doctor denied, his performance at table
being inappreciable, and confined, at least almost entirely, to a dish
of boiled rice, which crusty Hannah set before him, preparing it, it
might be, with a sympathy of her East Indian part towards him.

Well, Doctor Grimshawe easily got at what seemed to be all of the facts
of Colcord's life; how that he was a New-Englander, the descendant of
an ancient race of settlers, the last of them; for, once pretty
numerous in their quarter of the country, they seemed to have been
dying out,--exhaling from the earth, and passing to some other region.