But we grew to like him.  He was thoroughly kind and inoffensive in every way.  He was entirely willing to be talked to, but he did not care to talk.  If it was absolutely necessary, he could talk, and when he did talk he always made me think of the “French-English Dictionary for the Pocket,” compiled by the ingenious Mr. John Bellows; for nobody except that extraordinary Englishman could condense a greater amount of information into a smaller number of words.  During the time of his stay with us I think I learned more about China than any other man in the United States knew, and I do not believe that the aggregate of his utterances in the course of that six months could have amounted to one hour’s continuous talk.  Don’t ask me for the information.  I had no sort of use for it, and I forgot it as soon as I could.  I like Chinese bric-a-brac, but my interest in China ends there.

Yet it was not long before Uncle David slid into his own place in the family circle.  We soon found that he did not expect us to entertain him.  He wanted only to sit quiet and smoke his pipe, to take his two daily walks by himself, and to read the daily paper one afternoon and Macaulay’s “History of England” the next.  He was never tired of sitting and gazing amiably but silently at my wife; and, to head the list of his good points, he would hold the baby by the hour, and for some mysterious reason that baby, who required the exhibition of seventeen toys in a minute to be reasonably quiet in the arms of anybody else, would sit placidly in Uncle David’s lap, teething away steadily on the old gentleman’s watch-chain, as quiet and as solemn and as aged in appearance as any one of the assorted gods of porcelain and jade and ivory which our aromatic uncle had sent us.

The old house in Boston was a thing of the past.  My wife’s parents had been dead for some years, and no one remained of her immediate family except a certain Aunt Lucretia, who had lived with them until shortly before our marriage, when the breaking up of the family sent her West to find a home with a distant relative in California.  We asked Uncle Davy if he had stopped to see Aunt Lucretia as he came through California.  He said he had not.  We asked him if he wanted to have Aunt Lucretia invited on to pass a visit during his stay with us.  He answered that he did not.  This did not surprise us at all.  You might think that a brother might long to see a sister from whom he had been separated nearly all of a long lifetime, but then you might never have met Aunt Lucretia.  My wife made the offer only from a sense of duty; and only after a contest with me which lasted three days and nights.  Nothing but loss of sleep during an exceptionally busy time at my office induced me to consent to her project of inviting Aunt Lucretia.  When Uncle David put his veto upon the proposition I felt that he might have taken back all his rare and costly gifts, and I could still have loved him.