As is natural among the children of the poor, George was precocious where I was infantile, and undeveloped where I was elaborate.  Our minds could hardly find a point at which to touch.  He gave me, however, under cross-examination, interesting hints about rural matters, and I liked him, although I felt his company to be insipid.  Sometimes he carried my books by my side to the larger and more distant school which I now attended, but I was always in a fever of dread lest my schoolfellows should see him, and should accuse me of having to be ‘brought’ to school.  To explain to them that the companionship of this wholesome and rather blunt young peasant was part of my spiritual discipline would have been all beyond my powers.

It was soon after this that my stepmother made her one vain effort to break though the stillness of our lives.  My Father’s energy seemed to decline, to become more fitful, to take unseasonable directions.  My mother instinctively felt that his peculiarities were growing upon him; he would scarcely stir from his microscope, except to go to the chapel, and he was visible to fewer and fewer visitors.  She had taken a pleasure in his literary eminence, and she was aware that this, too, would slip from him; that, so persistently kept out of sight, he must soon be out of mind.  I know not how she gathered courage for her tremendous effort, but she took me, I recollect, into her counsels.  We were to unite to oblige my Father to start to his feet and face the world.  Alas! we might as well have attempted to rouse the summit of Yes Tor into volcanic action.  To my mother’s arguments, my Father—­with that baffling smile of his—­replied:  ’I esteem the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt!’ and that this answer was indirect made it none the less conclusive.  My mother wished him to give lectures, to go to London, to read papers before the Royal Society, to enter into controversy with foreign savants, to conduct classes of outdoor zoology at fashionable watering-places.  I held my breath with admiration as she poured forth her scheme, so daring, so brilliant, so sure to cover our great man with glory.  He listened to her with an ambiguous smile, and shook his head at us, and resumed the reading of his Bible.

At the date of which I write these pages, the arts of illustration are so universally diffused that it is difficult to realize the darkness in which a remote English village was plunged half a century ago.  No opportunity was offered to us dwellers in remote places of realizing the outward appearances of unfamiliar persons, scenes or things.  Although ours was perhaps the most cultivated household in the parish, I had never seen so much as a representation of a work of sculpture until I was thirteen.  My mother then received from her earlier home certain volumes, among which was a gaudy gift-book of some kind, containing a few steel engravings of statues.