concerning whom, indeed, he had once entertained philanthropic designs,
compounded of conversion to Christianity on the principles of the
English Episcopal Church, and of an advantageous exchange of beaver-
skins for Bibles, brandy, and gunpowder.

That Uncle Jack should win my heart was no wonder; my mother's he had
always won, from her earliest recollection of his having persuaded her
to let her great doll (a present from her godmother) be put up to a
raffle for the benefit of the chimney-sweepers. "So like him,--so
good!" she would often say pensively. "They paid sixpence apiece for
the raffle,--twenty tickets,--and the doll cost L2. Nobody was taken
in, and the doll, poor thing (it had such blue eyes!) went for a quarter
of its value. But Jack said nobody could guess what good the ten
shillings did to the chimney-sweepers." Naturally enough, I say, my
mother liked Uncle Jack; but my father liked him quite as well,--and
that was a strong proof of my uncle's powers of captivation. However,
it is noticeable that when some retired scholar is once interested in an
active man of the world, he is more inclined to admire him than others
are. Sympathy with such a companion gratifies at once his curiosity and
his indolence; he can travel with him, scheme with him, fight with him,
go with him through all the adventures of which his own books speak so
eloquently, and all the time never stir from his easy-chair. My father
said "that it was like listening to Ulysses to hear Uncle Jack!" Uncle
Jack, too, had been in Greece and Asia Minor, gone over the site of the
siege of Troy, eaten figs at Marathon, shot hares in the Peloponnesus,
and drunk three pints of brown stout at the top of the Great Pyramid.

Therefore, Uncle Jack was like a book of reference to my father. Verily
at times he looked on him as a book, and took him down after dinner as
he would a volume of Dodwell or Pausanias. In fact, I believe that