comfort him as amounted to pain. I think it was the desire to be near
him--in spirit, I mean, for I could be near him in the body any time
except when he was out on one of his lonely walks or rides--that made me
attend so closely to my studies. He taught me everything, and I yearned
to please him, but without this other half-conscious yearning I do not
believe I should ever have made the progress he praised. I took indeed a
true delight in learning, but I would not so often have shut the book I
was enjoying to the full and taken up another, but for the sight or the
thought of my uncle's countenance.

I think he never once sat down in the chair I have mentioned without
sooner or later rising hurriedly, and going out on one of his solitary
rambles.

When we were having our lessons together, as he phrased it, we sat at the
table side by side, and he taught me as if we were two children finding
out together what it all meant. Those lessons had, I think, the largest
share in the charm of the place; yet when, as not unfrequently, my uncle
would, in the middle of one of them, rise abruptly and leave me without a
word, to go, I knew, far away from the house, I was neither dismayed nor
uneasy: I had got used to the thing before I could wonder what it meant.
I would just go back to the book I had been reading, or to any other that
attracted me: he never required the preparation of any lessons. It was of
no use to climb to the window in the hope of catching sight of him, for
thence was nothing to be seen immediately below but the tops of high
trees and a corner of the yard into which the cow-houses opened, and my
uncle was never there. He neither understood nor cared about farming. His
elder brother, my father, had been bred to carry on the yeoman-line of
the family, and my uncle was trained to the medical profession. My father
dying rather suddenly, my uncle, who was abroad at the time, and had not