He spoke Italian as readily as English; French and the modern Greek with a little more difficulty; and could read in Greek, Latin, and Spanish.  His books were the “Meditations” of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” with the “Aeneis,” Ariosto, and some old Spanish romances next in order.  I do not think he cared greatly for any English writers but Donne and Izaak Walton, of whose “Angler” and “Life of Sir Henry Wotton” he was inordinately fond.  In particular he admired the character of this Sir Henry Wotton, singling him out among “the famous nations of the dead” (as Sir Thomas Browne calls them) for a kind of posthumous friendship—­nay, almost a passion of memory.  To be sure, though with more than a hundred years between them, both had been bred at Winchester, and both had known courts and embassies and retired from them upon private life. . . .  But who can explain friendship, even after all the essays written upon it?  Certainly to be friends with a dead man was to my father a feat neither impossible nor absurd.

Yet he possessed two dear living friends at least in my Uncle Gervase and Mr. Grylls, and had even dedicated a temple to their friendship.  It stood about half a mile away from the house, at the foot of the old deer-park:  a small Ionic summer-house set on a turfed slope facing down a dell upon the Helford River.  A spring of water, very cold and pure, rose bubbling a few paces from the porch and tumbled down the dell with a pretty chatter.  Tradition said that it had once been visited and blessed by St. Swithun, for which cause my father called his summer-house by the saint’s name, and annually on his festival (which falls on the 15th of July) caused wine and dessert to be carried out thither, where the three drank to their common pastime and discoursed of it in the cool of the evening within earshot of the lapsing water.  On many other evenings they met to smoke their pipes here, my father and Mr. Grylls playing at chequers sometimes, while my uncle wrapped and bent, till the light failed him, new trout flies for the next day’s sport; but to keep St. Swithun’s feast they never omitted, which my father commemorated with a tablet set against the back wall and bearing these lines—­

“Peace to this house within this little wood,
Named of St. Swithun and his brotherhood
That here would meet and punctual on his day
Their heads and hands and hearts together lay. 
Nor may no years the mem’ries three untwine
Of Grylls W.G. 
And Arundell G.A. 
And Constantine J.C.  Anno 1752

          Flvmina amem silvasqve inglorivs.”

Of these two friends of my father I shall speak in their proper place, but have given up this first chapter to him alone.  My readers maybe will grumble that it omits to tell what they would first choose to learn:  the reason why he had exchanged fame and the world for a Cornish exile.  But as yet he only—­and perhaps my uncle Gervase, who kept the accounts—­held the key to that secret.