I described him as well as I could.
‘Yes,’ said my uncle, ‘I dare say. He is a dangerous man.’
‘What did he want with me?’
‘He wanted to have something to do with your education. He is an old friend—acquaintance I ought to say—of your father’s. I should be sorry you had any intercourse with him. He is a very worldly kind of man. He believes in money and rank and getting on. He believes in nothing else that, I know.’
‘Then I am sure I shouldn’t like him,’ I said.
‘I am pretty sure you wouldn’t,’ returned my uncle.
I had never before heard him speak so severely of any one. But from this time he began to talk to me more as if I had been a grown man. There was a simplicity in his way of looking at things, however, which made him quite intelligible to a boy as yet uncorrupted by false aims or judgments. He took me about with him constantly, and I began to see him as he was, and to honour and love him more than ever.
Christmas-day this year fell on a Sunday. It was a model Christmas-day. My uncle and I walked to church in the morning. When we started, the grass was shining with frost, and the air was cold; a fog hung about the horizon, and the sun shone through it with red rayless countenance. But before we reached the church, which was some three miles from home, the fog was gone, and the frost had taken shelter with the shadows; the sun was dazzling without being clear, and the golden cock on the spire was glittering keen in the moveless air.
‘What do they put a cock on the spire for, uncle?’ I asked.
‘To end off with an ornament, perhaps,’ he answered.