re
very shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one
word the hopes we live on.

In this life of comparative seclusion to which the father had doomed
himself for the sake of his child, he had found time for large and varied
reading. The learned Judge Thornton confessed himself surprised at the
extent of Dudley Veneer's information. Doctor Kittredge found that he
was in advance of him in the knowledge of recent physiological
discoveries. He had taken pains to become acquainted with agricultural
chemistry; and the neighboring farmers owed him some useful hints about
the management of their land. He renewed his old acquaintance with the
classic authors. He loved to warm his pulses with Homer and calm them
down with Horace. He received all manner of new books and periodicals,
and gradually gained an interest in the events of the passing time. Yet
he remained almost a hermit, not absolutely refusing to see his
neighbors, nor even churlish towards them, but on the other hand not
cultivating any intimate relations with them.

He had retired from the world a young man, little more than a youth,
indeed, with sentiments and aspirations all of them suddenly
extinguished. The first had bequeathed him a single huge sorrow, the
second a single trying duty. In due time the anguish had lost something
of its poignancy, the light of earlier and happier memories had begun to
struggle with and to soften its thick darkness, and even that duty which
he had confronted with such an effort had become an endurable habit.

At a period of life when many have been living on the capital of their
acquired knowledge and their youthful stock of sensibilities until their
intellects are really shallower and their hearts emptier than they were
at twenty, Dudley Veneer was stronger in thought and tenderer in soul
than in the first freshness of his youth, when he counted but half his
present years. He had entered that period which marks the decline of men
who have ceased growing in knowledge and strength: from forty to fifty a
man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life
will carry him rapidly downward. At this time his inward: nature was
richer and deeper than in any earlier period of his life. If he could
only be summoned to action, he was capable of noble service. If his
sympathies could only find an outlet, he was never so capable of love as
now; for his natural affections had been gatherin