“What a number of books he has!” said Miss Pole, looking round the room. “And how dusty they are!”
“I think it must be like one of the great Dr. Johnson’s rooms,” said Miss Matey. “What a superior man your cousin must be!”
“Yes!” said Miss Pole; “he’s a great reader; but I am afraid he has got into very uncouth habits with living alone.”
“Oh! uncouth is too hard a word. I should call him eccentric: very clever people always are!” replied Miss Matey.
When Mr. Holbrook returned, he proposed a walk in the fields; but the two elder ladies were afraid of damp and dirt, and had only very unbecoming calashes to put on over their caps; so they declined, and I was again his companion in a turn which he said he was obliged to take, to see after his niece. He strode along, either wholly forgetting my existence, or soothed into silence by his pipe; and yet it was not silence exactly. He walked before me, with a stooping gait, his hands clasped behind him, and as some tree, or cloud, or glimpse at distant upland pastures, struck him, he quoted poetry to himself; saying it out loud, in a grand, sonorous voice, with just the emphasis that true feeling and appreciation give. We came upon an old cedar-tree, which stood at one end of the house;
‘More black than ash-buds in the front of March,
A cedar spread his dark-green layers of shade.’
“Capital term, ‘layers!’ Wonderful man!”
I did not know whether he was speaking to me or not; but I put in an assenting “Wonderful,” although I knew nothing about it; just because I was tired of being forgotten, and of being consequently silent.
He turned sharp round. “Ay! you may say ‘wonderful.’ Why, when I saw the review of his poems in ‘Blackwood,’ I set off within an hour, and walked seven miles to Misselton (for the horses were not in the way), and ordered them. Now, what color are ash-buds in March?”