That I was a very wonderful child, I take for granted; but, nevertheless, it was not of my own knowledge that I came into possession of the circumstances set down in my former chapters. But my father’s conduct on the occasion of my birth made a notable impression upon all who witnessed it; and Mr Squills and Mrs Primmins have related the facts to me sufficiently often, to make me as well acquainted with them as those worthy witnesses themselves. I fancy I see my father before me, in his dark-gray dressing-gown, and with his odd, half sly, half innocent twitch of the mouth, and peculiar puzzling look, from two quiet, abstracted, indolently handsome eyes, at the moment he agreed with Helvetius on the propriety of sending me to school as soon as I was born. Nobody knew exactly what to make of my father—his wife excepted. Some set him down as a sage, some as a fool. As Hippocrates, in his well-known letter to Damagetes, saith of the great Democritus, he was _contemptu et admiratione habitus_—accustomed both to contempt and admiration. The neighbouring clergy respected him as a scholar, “breathing libraries;” the ladies despised him as an absent pedant, who had no more gallantry than a stock or a stone. The poor loved him for his charities, but laughed at him as a weak sort of man, easily taken in. Yet the squires and farmers found that, in their own matters of rural business, he had always a fund of curious information to impart; and whoever, young or old, gentle or simple, learned or ignorant, asked his advice, it was given with not more humility than wisdom. In the common affairs of life, he seemed incapable of acting for himself; he left all to my mother; or, if taken unawares, was pretty sure to be the dupe. But in those very affairs—if _another_ consulted him—his eye brightened, his brow cleared, the desire of serving made him a new being: cautious, profound, practical. Too lazy or too languid where only his own interests were at stake—touch his benevolence, and all the wheels of the clockwork felt the impetus of the master-spring. No wonder that, to others, the nut of such a character was hard to crack! But, in the eyes of my poor mother, Augustine (familiarly Austin) Caxton was the best and the greatest of human beings; and certainly she ought to have known him well, for she studied him with her whole heart, knew every trick of his face, and, nine times out of ten, divined what he was going to say, before he opened his lips. Yet certainly there were deeps in his nature which the plummet of her tender woman’s wit had never sounded; and, certainly, it sometimes happened that, even in his most domestic colloquialisms, my mother was in doubt whether he was the simple straightforward person he was mostly taken for. There was, indeed, a kind of suppressed subtle irony about him, too unsubstantial to be popularly called humour, but dimly implying some sort of jest, which he kept all to himself; and this was only noticeable when he said something