With feeling comes observation; after that, one reasons.  I began to observe.  Aunt Mercy was not the Aunt Merce I had known at home.  She wore a mask before her father.  There was constraint between them; each repressed the other.  The result of this relation was a formal, petrifying, unyielding system,—­a system which, from the fact of its satisfying neither, was kept up the more rigidly; on the one side from a morbid conscience, which reiterated its monitions against the dictates of the natural heart; on the other, out of respect and timidity.

Grandfather Warren was a little, lean, leather-colored man.  His head was habitually bent, his eyes cast down; but when he raised them to peer about, their sharpness and clear intelligence gave his face a wonderful vitality.  He chafed his small, well-shaped hands continually; his long polished nails clicked together with a shelly noise, like that which beetles make flying against the ceiling.  His features were delicate and handsome; gentle blood ran in his veins, as I have said.  All classes in Barmouth treated him with invariable courtesy.  He was aboriginal in character, not to be moved by antecedent or changed by innovation—­a Puritan, without gentleness or tenderness.  He scarcely concealed his contempt for the emollients of life, or for those who needed them.  He whined over no misfortune, pined for no pleasure.  His two sons, who broke loose from him, went into the world, lived a wild, merry life, and died there, he never named.  He found his wife dead by his side one morning.  He did not go frantic, but selected a text for the funeral sermon; and when he stood by the uncovered grave, took off his hat and thanked his friends for their kindness with a loud, steady voice.  Aunt Mercy told me that after her mother’s death his habit of chafing his hands commenced; it was all the difference she saw in him, for he never spoke of his trouble or acknowledged his grief by sign or word.

Though he had been frugal and industrious all his life, he had no more property than the old, rambling house we lived in, and a long, narrow garden attached to it, where there were a few plum and quince trees, a row of currant bushes, Aunt Mercy’s beds of chamomile and sage, and a few flowers.  At the end of the garden was a peaked-roof pigsty; it was cleanly kept, and its inhabitant had his meals served with the regularity which characterized all that Grandfather Warren did.  Beautiful pigeons lived in the roof, and were on friendly terms with the occupant on the lower floor.  The house was not unpicturesque.  It was built on a corner, facing two streets.  One front was a story high, with a slanting roof; the other, which was two-storied, sloped like a giraffe’s back, down to a wood-shed.  Clean cobwebs hung from its rafters, and neat heaps of fragrant chips were piled on the floor.