He could not be called a
man of learning; he was only a great bookworm; for his reading lay
all in the nebulous regions of history. Old family records,
wherever he could lay hold upon them, were his favourite dishes;
old, musty books, that looked as if they knew something everybody
else had forgotten, made his eyes gleam, and his white
taper-fingered hand tremble with eagerness. With such a book in his
grasp he saw something ever beckoning him on, a dimly precious
discovery, a wonderful fact just the shape of some missing fragment
in the mosaic of one of his pictures of the past. To tell the
truth, however, his discoveries seldom rounded themselves into
pictures, though many fragments of the minutely dissected map would
find their places, whereupon he rejoiced like a mild giant refreshed
with soda-water. But I have already said more about him than his
place justifies; therefore, although I could gladly linger over the
portrait, I will leave it. He had taught his daughter next to
nothing. Being his child, he had the vague feeling that she
inherited his wisdom, and that what he knew she knew. So she sat
reading novels, generally trashy ones, while he knew no more of what
was passing in her mind than of what the Admirable Crichton might,
at the moment, be disputing with the angels.
I would not have my reader suppose that Mysie's mind was corrupted.
It was so simple and childlike, leaning to what was pure, and
looking up to what was noble, that anything directly bad in the
books she happened--for it was all haphazard--to read, glided over
her as a black cloud may glide over a landscape, leaving it sunny as
before.
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