the usual American _laisser-aller_ in education was a very vulgar
practice, and that children were not to grow up like dusty thorns by the
wayside." "So you see," Pickering went on, smiling and blushing, and yet
with something of the irony of vain regret, "I am a regular garden plant.
I have been watched and watered and pruned, and if there is any virtue in
tending I ought to take the prize at a flower show. Some three years ago
my father's health broke down, and he was kept very much within doors.
So, although I was a man grown, I lived altogether at home. If I was out
of his sight for a quarter of an hour he sent some one after me. He had
severe attacks of neuralgia, and he used to sit at his window, basking in
the sun. He kept an opera-glass at hand, and when I was out in the
garden he used to watch me with it. A few days before his death I was
twenty-seven years old, and the most innocent youth, I suppose, on the
continent. After he died I missed him greatly," Pickering continued,
evidently with no intention of making an epigram. "I stayed at home, in
a sort of dull stupor. It seemed as if life offered itself to me for the
first time, and yet as if I didn't know how to take hold of it."

He uttered all this with a frank eagerness which increased as he talked,
and there was a singular contrast between the meagre experience he
described and a certain radiant intelligence which I seemed to perceive
in his glance and tone. Evidently he was a clever fellow, and his
natural faculties were excellent. I imagined he had read a great deal,
and recovered, in some degree, in restless intellectual conjecture, the
freedom he was condemned to ignore in practice. Opportunity was now
offering a meaning to the empty forms with which his imagination was
stored, but it appeared to him dimly, through the veil of his personal
diffidence.

"I have not sailed round the world, as you suppose," I said, "but I