In short, scholarship to him was like poetry; he could no more teach it
you than Pindar could have taught you how to make an ode. You breathed
the aroma, but you could no more seize and analyze it than, with the
opening of your naked hand, you could carry off the scent of a rose. I
soon left my father in peace to Cardan and to the Great Book,--which
last, by the way, advanced but slowly; for Uncle Jack had now insisted
on its being published in quarto, with illustrative plates, and those
plates took an immense time, and were to cost an immense sum,--but that
cost was the affair of the Anti-Publisher Society. But how can I settle
to work by myself? No sooner have I got into my room--penitus ab orbe
divisus, as I rashly think--than there is a tap at the door. Now it is
my mother, who is benevolently engaged upon making curtains to all the
windows (a trifling superfluity that Bolt had forgotten or disdained),
and who wants to know how the draperies are fashioned at Mr.
Trevanion's,--a pretence to have me near her, and see with her own eyes
that I am not fretting; the moment she hears I have shut myself up in my
room, she is sure that it is for sorrow. Now it is Bolt, who is making
bookshelves for my father, and desires to consult me at every turn,
especially as I have given him a Gothic design, which pleases him
hugely. Now it is Blanche, whom, in an evil hour, I undertook to teach
to draw, and who comes in on tiptoe, vowing she'll not disturb me, and
sits so quiet that she fidgets me out of all patience. Now, and much
more often, it is the Captain, who wants me to walk, to ride, to fish.
And, by St. Hubert (saint of the chase) bright August comes, and there
is moorgame on those barren wolds; and my uncle has given me the gun he
shot with at my age,--single-barrelled, flint lock; but you would not
have laughed at it if you had seen the strange feats it did in Roland's
hands,--while in mine, I could always lay the blame on the flint lock!
Time, in short, passed rapidly; and if Roland and I had our dark hours,