nder to Philip, who had lost his father
before he was six years old, and he was more attracted to the timid and
gentle little widow than to his equable but more robust Aunt Eusebia,
Mrs. Maitland, his father's elder sister, whom Philip fancied not a bit
like his father except in sincerity, a quality common to the Maitlands
and Burnetts. Yet there was a family likeness between his aunt and a
portrait of his father, painted by a Boston artist of some celebrity,
which his mother, who survived her husband only three years, had
saved for her boy. His father was a farmer, but a man of considerable
cultivation, though not college-bred--his last request on his death-bed
was that Phil should be sent to college--a man who made experiments in
improving agriculture and the breed of cattle and horses, read papers
now and then on topics of social and political reform, and was the only
farmer in all the hill towns who had what might be called a library.

It was all scattered at the time of the winding up of the farm estate,
and the only jetsam that Philip inherited out of it was an annotated
copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Young's Travels in France, a
copy of The Newcomes, and the first American edition of Childe
Harold. Probably these odd volumes had not been considered worth any
considerable bid at the auction. From his mother, who was fond of books,
and had on more than one occasion, of the failure of teachers, taught
in the village school in her native town before her marriage, Philip
inherited his love of poetry, and he well remembered how she used to try
to inspire him with patriotism by reading the orations of Daniel Webster
(she was very fond of orations), and telling him war stories about
Grant and Sherman and Sheridan and Farragut and Lincoln. He distinctly
remembered also standing at her knees and trying, at intervals, to
commit to memory the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. He had learned it all
since, because he thought it would please his mother, and because there
was something in it that appealed to his coming sense of the mystery
of life. When he repeated it to Celia, who had never heard of it, and
remarked that it was all made up, and that she never tried to learn a
long thing like that that wasn't so, Philip could see that her respect
for him increased a little. He did not know that the child got it out
of the library the next day and never rested till she knew it by heart.
Philip could repeat also the books of th