stions, which seemed to imply censure on all that
I had hitherto thought unquestionable, and perhaps I told him somewhat
impatiently that, when he had been a little longer here, he would
understand our ways and fall naturally into them.

"That's just what I don't want," he said.

"Not want?" I exclaimed.

"Yes; I want to see clearly before I get used to things."

And as, perhaps, I seemed to wonder at this way of beginning, he opened
a little, and said, "It is my father. He told me that if ever I came
here I was to mind and do his work."

"What kind of work?" I asked, anxiously.

"Doing what he meant to have done," returned Harold, "for the poor. He
said I should find out about it."

"You must have been too young to understand much of what he meant
then," I said. "Did he not regret anything?"

"Yes, he said he had begun at the wrong end, when they were not ripe
for it, and that the failure had ruined him for trying again."

"Then he did see things differently at last?" I said, hoping to find
that the sentiments I had always heard condemned had not been
perpetuated.

"Oh yes!" cried Eustace. "They were just brutes, you know, that nobody
could do any good to, and were only bent on destroying, and had no
gratitude nor sense; and that was the ruin of him and of my father too."

"They were ignorant, and easily maddened," said Harold, gravely. "He
did not know how little they could be controlled. I must find out the
true state of things. Prometesky said I must read it up."

"Prometesky!" I cried in despair. "Oh, Harold, you have not been
influenced by that old firebrand?"

"He taught me almost all I know," was the answer, still much to my
dismay; but I showed Harold to the library, and directed him to some
old books of my father's, which I fancied might enlighten him on the
subjects on which he needed information, though I feared they might be
rather out of date; and whenever he was not out of doors, he was
reading them, sometimes running his fingers through his yellow hair, or
pulling his beard, and growling to himself when he was puzzled or met
with what he did not like. Eustace's favourite study, meanwhile, was
"Burke's Peerage," and his questions nearly drove me wild by their
absurdity; and Dora rolled on the floor with my Spitz dog, for she
loathed the doll I gave her, and made me more afraid of her than of
either of the others.

Harold was all might and gentleness; Eustace viewed me as a glass of