his mother's idol, and indeed
almost every one else's too. From his earliest boyhood he took people's
hearts by storm, and kept them. No one could see him and not love that
open, generous, handsome face, with its laughing blue eyes, and setting
of rich brown curling hair. No one could hear his joyous, confiding
voice, and the expressions of unaffected and earnest interest with which
he threw himself into every subject which fairly engaged his attention
or affections, without feeling drawn with all the cords of the heart to
the noble boy. There was such a thorough openness and freedom in all
that he did and said, yet without recklessness and without indifference
to the feelings of others. And when, through thoughtlessness or
forgetfulness, as was not unfrequently the case, he happened to find
himself in some awkward scrape or perplexity, he would toss back his
waving hair with a half-vexed half-comical expression, which would
disarm at once his mother's anger, spite of herself, and turn her severe
rebuke into a mild remonstrance. Alas, that sin should ever mar such a
lovely work of God! Frank loved the look of nature that lay open all
around him, but not his own books. He abhorred study, and only
submitted to it from a sense of duty. His father, at Lady Oldfield's
urgent request, kept him at home, and engaged a private tutor for him,
whose office would have been a sinecure but for the concern it gave him
to find his pupil so hard to drag along the most level paths of
learning. Dog's-ears disfigured Frank's books, the result simply of
restless fingers; and dog's heads; executed in a masterly style, were
the subjects of his pen. He loved roaming about, and there was not an
old ruin within many miles round of which he did not know every crevice,
nor any birds of song or prey with whose haunts and habits he was not
intimately acquainted. In fishing, riding, swimming, he was an early
adept, and every outdoor sport was his delight. All the dogs in the
neighbourhood rejoiced in him, and every cottager's wife blessed him
when he flung his bright smiles around him as he passed along. At no
place was he more welcome than at the rectory, nor was there any house
in which he felt so happy, not even excepting his own home. With all
his wildness he felt the most sincere love and respect for Mr and Mrs
Oliphant, and rejoiced in a day spent with their children. And there
was one of these towards whom he was drawn with feeli