home, often late night. In the house he much preferred his own room to
any other.

This room, not so large as the kitchen-hall, but quite as long, seems to
me, when I look back, my earliest surrounding. It was the centre from
which my roving fancies issued as from their source, and the end of their
journey to which as to their home they returned. It was a curious place.
Were you to see first the inside of the house and then the outside, you
would find yourself at a loss to conjecture where within it could be
situated such a room. It was not, however, contained in what, to a
cursory glance, passed for the habitable house, and a stranger would not
easily have found the entrance to it.

Both its nature and situation were in keeping with certain peculiarities
of my uncle's mental being. He was given to curious inquiries. He would
set out to solve now one now another historical point as odd as
uninteresting to any but a mind capable of starting such a question. To
determine it, he would search book after book, as if it were a live
thing, in whose memory must remain, darkly stored, thousands of facts,
requiring only to be recollected: amongst them might nestle the thing he
sought, and he would dig for it as in a mine that went branching through
the hardened dust of ages. I fancy he read any old book whatever of
English history with the haunting sense that next moment he might come
upon the trace of certain of his own ancestors of whom he specially
desired to enlarge his knowledge. Whether he started any new thing in
mathematics I cannot tell, but he would sit absorbed, every day and all
day long, for weeks, over his slate, suddenly throw it down, walk out for
the rest of the day, and leave his calculus, or whatever it was, for
months. He read Shakespeare as with a microscope, propounding and
answering the most curious little questions. It seemed to me sometimes, I