high feather at the prospective display. But it recalled family troubles ere long; and all the way home he talked dismally of himself as an “exile like Byron—my literary second-self.” Somebody had once called him “own brother to Byron”; he never tired of quoting the phrase; he was destitute of humour, and made Tom blush for him, where he would have shaken with laughter at another.
His contrariety was unique. Not only was he a good magistrate spoilt, through neglecting the Bench for his desk, but an old athlete who bragged about the poetry he could not write instead of about the races he had really won. On the top of his bookshelf stood the row of tarnished silver cups, and his proud eye climbed no higher than the volume or two of mediocre verse underneath. He made little enough of his genuine triumphs, his real abilities; but he would talk with bated breath of a few stanzas which often rhymed as false as they rang. Once Tom cleaned the cups when Daintree was out, and he flew into something very like a rage when he came in and saw them; he was the most unaccountable of men.
“Still he is the kindest,” was Tom’s reflection on the top of that conclusion; and the same night he not only made another of his poor attempts at thanking Daintree for all that he was doing and had done; he at last put the question which seemed to mark a stride in his slow and up-hill return from brute to man. And yet, even now, it was no very sincere curiosity, but rather an uncomfortable feeling that he ought to seem curious, which prompted him to say:—
“I can’t understand your kindness to me! Why did you begin it; why do you go on? I wonder what made you take an interest in me at the start!”
