“What a number of books he has!” said Miss Pole, looking round the room.  “And how dusty they are!”

“I think it must be like one of the great Dr Johnson’s rooms,” said Miss Matty.  “What a superior man your cousin must be!”

“Yes!” said Miss Pole, “he’s a great reader; but I am afraid he has got into very uncouth habits with living alone.”

“Oh! uncouth is too hard a word.  I should call him eccentric; very clever people always are!” replied Miss Matty.

When Mr Holbrook returned, he proposed a walk in the fields; but the two elder ladies were afraid of damp, and dirt, and had only very unbecoming calashes to put on over their caps; so they declined, and I was again his companion in a turn which he said he was obliged to take to see after his men.  He strode along, either wholly forgetting my existence, or soothed into silence by his pipe—­and yet it was not silence exactly.  He walked before me with a stooping gait, his hands clasped behind him; and, as some tree or cloud, or glimpse of distant upland pastures, struck him, he quoted poetry to himself, saying it out loud in a grand sonorous voice, with just the emphasis that true feeling and appreciation give.  We came upon an old cedar tree, which stood at one end of the house —

“The cedar spreads his dark-green layers of shade.”

“Capital term—­’layers!’ Wonderful man!” I did not know whether he was speaking to me or not; but I put in an assenting “wonderful,” although I knew nothing about it, just because I was tired of being forgotten, and of being consequently silent.

He turned sharp round.  “Ay! you may say ‘wonderful.’  Why, when I saw the review of his poems in Blackwood, I set off within an hour, and walked seven miles to Misselton (for the horses were not in the way) and ordered them.  Now, what colour are ash-buds in March?”

Is the man going mad? thought I. He is very like Don Quixote.

“What colour are they, I say?” repeated he vehemently.

“I am sure I don’t know, sir,” said I, with the meekness of ignorance.

“I knew you didn’t.  No more did I—­an old fool that I am!—­till this young man comes and tells me.  Black as ash-buds in March.  And I’ve lived all my life in the country; more shame for me not to know.  Black:  they are jet-black, madam.”  And he went off again, swinging along to the music of some rhyme he had got hold of.

When we came back, nothing would serve him but he must read us the poems he had been speaking of; and Miss Pole encouraged him in his proposal, I thought, because she wished me to hear his beautiful reading, of which she had boasted; but she afterwards said it was because she had got to a difficult part of her crochet, and wanted to count her stitches without having to talk.  Whatever he had proposed would have been right to Miss Matty; although she did fall sound asleep within five minutes after he had begun a long poem, called “Locksley Hall,” and had a comfortable nap, unobserved, till he ended; when the cessation of his voice wakened her up, and she said, feeling that something was expected, and that Miss Pole was counting —