in awe
of him for a different reason, and this I know now was because he
possessed the penetration to discern the flaws in my youthful
character,--flaws that persisted in manhood. None so quick as Cousin
Robert to detect deceptions which were hidden from my mother.

His hobby was carpentering, and he had a little shop beside the stable
filled with shining tools which Willie and I, in spite of their
attractions, were forbidden to touch. Willie, by dire experience, had
learned to keep the law; but on one occasion I stole in alone, and
promptly cut my finger with a chisel. My mother and Cousin Jenny accepted
the fiction that the injury had been done with a flint arrowhead that
Willie had given me, but when Cousin Robert came home and saw my bound
hand and heard the story, he gave me a certain look which sticks in my
mind.

"Wonderful people, those Indians were!" he observed. "They could make
arrowheads as sharp as chisels."

I was most uncomfortable....

He had a strong voice, and spoke with a rising inflection and a marked
accent that still remains peculiar to our locality, although it was much
modified in my mother and not at all noticeable in my father; with an odd
nasal alteration of the burr our Scotch-Irish ancestors had brought with
them across the seas. For instance, he always called my father Mr.
Par-r-ret. He had an admiration and respect for him that seemed to forbid
the informality of "Matthew." It was shared by others of my father's
friends and relations.

"Sarah," Cousin Robert would say to my mother, "you're coddling that boy,
you ought to lam him oftener. Hand him over to me for a couple of
months--I'll put him through his paces.... So you're going to send him to
college, are you? He's too good for old Benjamin's grocery business."

He was very fond of my mother, though he lectured her soundly for her
weakness in indulging me. I can see him as he sat at the head of the
supper table, carving liberal helpings which Mary and Helen and Willie
devoured with country appetites, watching our plates.

"What's the matter, Hugh? You haven't eaten all your lamb."

"He doesn't like fat, Robert," my mother explained.

"I'd teach him to like it if he were my boy."

"Well, Robert, he isn't your boy," Cousin Jenny would remind him.... His
bark was worse than his bite. Like many kind people he made use of
brusqueness to hide an inner tenderness, and on the train he was hail
fellow well met with every Tom, Dick a