on the occasion of my birth made a notable impression upon all who
witnessed it; and Mr. Squills and Mrs. Primmins have related the facts
to me sufficiently often to make me as well acquainted with them as
those worthy witnesses themselves. I fancy I see my father before me,
in his dark-gray dressing-gown, and with his odd, half-sly, half-
innocent twitch of the mouth, and peculiar puzzling look, from two
quiet, abstracted, indolently handsome eyes, at the moment he agreed
with Helvetius on the propriety of sending me to school as soon as I was
born. Nobody knew exactly what to make of my father,--his wife
excepted. The people of Abdera sent for Hippocrates to cure the
supposed insanity of Democritus, "who at that time," saith Hippocrates,
dryly, "was seriously engaged in philosophy." That same people of
Abdera would certainly have found very alarming symptoms of madness in
my poor father; for, like Democritus, "he esteemed as nothing the
things, great or small, in which the rest of the world were employed."
Accordingly, some set him down as a sage, some as a fool. The
neighboring clergy respected him as a scholar, "breathing libraries;"
the ladies despised him as an absent pedant who had no more gallantry
than a stock or a stone. The poor loved him for his charities, but
laughed at him as a weak sort of man, easily taken in. Yet the squires
and farmers found that, in their own matters of rural business, he had
always a fund of curious information to impart; and whoever, young or
old, gentle or simple, learned or ignorant, asked his advice, it was
given with not more humility than wisdom. In the common affairs of life
he seemed incapable of acting for himself; he left all to my mother; or,
if taken unawares, was pretty sure to be the dupe. But in those very
affairs, if another consulted him, his eye brightened, his brow cleared,
the desire of serving made him a new being,--cautious, profound,
practical. Too lazy or too languid where only his own interests were at
stake, touch his benevolence, and all the wheels of the clock-work felt