replied brazenly, 'An author,' they flung up their hands, and one
exclaimed reproachfully, 'And you an M.A.!' My mother's views at
first were not dissimilar; for long she took mine jestingly as
something I would grow out of, and afterwards they hurt her so that
I tried to give them up. To be a minister - that she thought was
among the fairest prospects, but she was a very ambitious woman,
and sometimes she would add, half scared at her appetite, that
there were ministers who had become professors, 'but it was not
canny to think of such things.'

I had one person only on my side, an old tailor, one of the fullest
men I have known, and quite the best talker. He was a bachelor (he
told me all that is to be known about woman), a lean man, pallid of
face, his legs drawn up when he walked as if he was ever carrying
something in his lap; his walks were of the shortest, from the tea-
pot on the hob to the board on which he stitched, from the board to
the hob, and so to bed. He might have gone out had the idea struck
him, but in the years I knew him, the last of his brave life, I
think he was only in the open twice, when he 'flitted' - changed
his room for another hard by. I did not see him make these
journeys, but I seem to see him now, and he is somewhat dizzy in
the odd atmosphere; in one hand he carries a box-iron, he raises
the other, wondering what this is on his head, it is a hat; a faint
smell of singed cloth goes by with him. This man had heard of my
set of photographs of the poets and asked for a sight of them,
which led to our first meeting. I remember how he spread them out
on his board, and after looking long at them, turned his gaze on me
and said solemnly,