I think Master Caleb must have been very lonely, or he would never have made a friend of such a boy as I was; but for all his learning he was just as simple-hearted as a child.
Even I knew more of the world than he did, at least of the world as it was at Wyncliffe. He came at last to treat me as if I was nearly his own age, and to talk to me of the things that he was thinking most about.
For Mrs. Janet, proud of him as she was, rather disapproved of his learning. She could not well say what harm she expected it to do him, but she was clear in her own mind that Caleb went too far. He knew so much and saw so many sides to everything that he got mazed, she said.
'But there is more than one side to most questions, isn't there?' he sometimes asked.
'Yes, Caleb. There's a right side and a wrong, and that's enough for me.'
'Well, my dear,' I remember her saying eagerly to him one day, when it was so hot that everything and everybody had gone wrong in school, and the sound of a scuffle had reached her from afar; 'Well, brother, I trust you haven't spared the rod to-day.'
'Why, Janet,'—he pushed back the hair from his forehead,—'it's very hot, and everybody feels cross. I'm sure I do.'
'Caleb!' in an awful voice.
'Don't you believe in atmospheric influences?' asked Master Caleb, who was rather fond of bringing out a hard word now and then.
'Atmospheric nonsense,' said Mrs. Janet, knitting furiously.