"I FELL GRIEVOUSLY ILL."
As I have said, I was the youngest of the whole Fowler family, brothers and sisters and cousins. The winter that I was twelve years of age I fell grievously ill, so ill that they thought I should never recover. Then, for the first time, I saw a doctor. Our people had no great faith in doctors, and this was the only occasion on which one had been in Bracken Glen for ten years.
My father and mother were assured that I was certain to die if I were not instantly sent to a milder climate, say the Isle of Wight or some genial part of the South Coast. There was a grave demur, a long debate, and finally I was despatched to the home of a married cousin whose name I had heard and of whom I knew little except that he was the son of my father's eldest sister, that he was not a miller, which was a reproach to him, and that he did not conform to the observances seen at Bracken Glen, or indeed hold the same form of religious belief.
I was too weak and wretched when I left home to care about anything, to care whether I was moved or not, whether I was to taste warmer air or not, whether I lived or not. If they would only let me alone I think I should have preferred to die.
I was taken from the cold, bleak, northern Glen where, although we ground corn never any grew, and carried hundreds of miles south; an interminable journey, it seemed to my young mind and feeble, sensitive body.
All through that winter I was delicate, and not allowed out of doors. My cousin's name was Harding. I had never met either him or his wife before. He was about thirty, and she twenty-five. They were simple people, with much of the hereditary aversion from frivolity, but they were not dogmatic or censorious, and they were beyond and above all the very kindest people I ever met in all my life. They lived a mile out of the little town of Bickerton, on the high road. They were childless. He traded in corn in Bickerton. The taste for grain seemed to run in the blood of our family.
In my old home my education had not been neglected. I could read and cypher, and I knew the heaviness of all the weights, and the dryness of all the dry measures. My father had taught me the elements of Euclid and Algebra, and I remember that the most awful terrors were in my mind of what these sciences could be in operation if their mere elements were so forbidding, and cold, and tyrannical. My father had a theory that any man able to "keep a set of books" could never be ship-wrecked in life. He had tried to instil a passion for book-keeping into my mind. So intense was my loathing of that black art that to this day the mere mention of it rouses me to fury. In fine, I may say that I had laid the foundation of what was called a commercial education, and upon this I had raised up my own sole and overwhelming horror of arithmetical figures, triangles, debtor and creditor, and unknown quantities.
Sufficient of the old leaven of the Fowlers worked in Harding, not only to draw him into the grain trade, but to make him still shy of "sweet sounds that give delight and hurt not." There was no musical instrument in the house, but books—
There were hundreds of books!