In a very short time Austin had overcome the initial difficulties of locomotion, and now began to take regular exercise out of doors.  It would be too much to say that his gait was particularly elegant; but there really was something triumphal about the way in which he learnt to brandish his leg with every step he took, and the majestic swing with which he brought it round to its place in advance of the other.  In fact, he soon found himself stumping along the highroads with wonderful speed and safety; though to clamber over stiles, and work a bicycle one-footed, of course took much more practice.

Hitherto I have said nothing about the neighbourhood of Austin’s home.  Now when I say neighbourhood, I don’t mean the topographical surroundings—­I use the word in its correcter sense of neighbours; and these it is necessary to refer to in passing.  Of course there were several people living round about.  There was the MacTavish family, for instance, consisting of Mr and Mrs MacTavish, five daughters and two sons.  Mrs MacTavish had a brother who had been knighted, and on the strength of such near relationship to Sir Titus and Lady Clandougal, considered herself one of the county.  But her claim was not endorsed, even by the humbler gentry with whom she was forced to associate, while as for the county proper it is not too much to say that that august community had never even heard of her.  The Miss MacTavishes, ranging in age from fifteen to five-and-twenty, were rather gawky young persons, with red hair and a perpetual giggle; in fact they could not speak without giggling, even if it was to tell you that somebody was dead.  Every now and then Mrs MacTavish would proclaim, with portentous complacency, that Florrie, or Lizzie, or Aggie, was “out”—­to the awe-struck admiration of her friends; which meant that the young person referred to had begun to do up her hair in a sort of bun at the back of her head, and had had her frock let down a couple of tucks.  Austin couldn’t bear them, though he was always scrupulously polite.  And the boys were, if anything, less interesting than the girls.  The elder of the two—­a freckled young giant named Jock—­was always asking him strange conundrums, such as whether he was going to put the pot on for the Metropolitan—­which conveyed no more idea to Austin’s mind than if he had said it in Chinese; while Sandy, the younger, used to terrify him out of his wits by shouting out that Yorkshire had got the hump, or that Jobson was ‘not out’ for a century, or that wickets were cheap at the Oval.  In fact, the entire family bored him to extinction, though Aunt Charlotte, who had been an old school-friend of the mamma, sang their praises perseveringly, and said that the girls were dears.