’My son Howel, oh yes, he’ll be a blessing to me, I know.  Says I to my poor Griffey—­oh, dear, only to be thinking of him now!—­says I, “Let us be giving Howel a good eddication, and he so clever as never was, and able to be learning everything he do put his mind to, and never daunted at nothing—­grammar, nor music, nor Latin, nor no heathen languages, and able to read so soon as he could speak, and knowing all the beasts in the ark one from another, when he was no bigger than that,” says I, to my poor Griffey; “oh, annwyl! we have only wan child, let him be a clargy, or a ’torney, or a doctor, or something smart,” and says he, “I can’t afford it.”  He was rather near or so, you know, was my poor Griffey; but I never was letting him rest day or night, and the only thing he wasn’t liking was being much talked over.  So says I, “Come you, Jinkins, bach,”—­he liked to be called by his sirname—­“if you do larn Howel well, he’ll be making his fortune some day,” for he do say so, he do be always saying, “I’ll be a great man, and get as much money as father.”  I eused to put in the last words of myself, for Howel never was taking to making money, but ’ould as soon give it away as not.  Only poor Griffey—­oh dear! oh dear!—­was never knowing that, because I did be hiding it from him as much as I could.’

Whilst the widow talks on in this strain to her sympathising friends, her son and Rowland Prothero are in another small room of the house, engaged in a very different style of conversation.  The room in which they are is worth a few words of description, not for any beauty or desert of its own, but for its heterogeneous, contents.  You would think a small music warehouse, a miniature tobacco shop, or branch depot of foreign grammars and dictionaries were before you.  Every kind of musical instrument seems to have met with a companion in this tiny apartment.  Here are a violin, violoncello, horn, and cornopean; there an old Welsh harp and unstrung guitar.  On this shelf are pipes of all sorts and sizes, forms, and nations—­the straight English, the short German, and the long Turkish; on that are cigar-boxes, snuff-boxes, and tobacco-boxes of various kinds and appearances.  Scattered about the room are play-books without number, from Shakspeare to the dramatists of the present day; and, interspersed with these, collections of songs of all countries and of all grades of merit.  Some few novels, mostly French, live with the plays and songs; and Latin, French, German, Italian, Welsh, Spanish, and English grammars and dictionaries take up their abode in every available corner.  A quantity of fishing tackle and a gun are thrown upon the window seat, and an embroidered waistcoat, blue satin cravat, and a pair of yellow kid gloves lie on an unoccupied chair.

From the general appearance of this room, the imagination would conceive great things of its inmate.  All we shall here say is that he is one who has the reputation of being a natural genius, and firmly believes that he is one.