Gerald’s letters, which arrived every Tuesday morning, were a never-ceasing spring of interest to Mr. Eversley. There was no post-office at Kestercham; the letters were brought by a carrier who walked from Wickeston. If he walked briskly, he ought to arrive at the vicarage before breakfast; but he was rather a loquacious person, and, having a large and not very prosperous family, was apt to linger at the cottages and shops of his acquaintances, or at other places, to lament the happiness of one whose domestic quiver was, through no fault of his own, unduly full--a happiness guaranteed (as he was wont to say) by sacred authority, and the more familiarly known to him from the circumstance of his acting on Sundays as parish clerk in Kestercham Church. Instead of ‘speaking with his enemies in the gate,’ Mr. Dawes (for that was the letter-carrier’s name) was not ashamed to be found speaking with his friends in the public-house. This garrulous dilatoriness was a great annoyance to Mr. Eversley, who wanted his letters, and in the early part of Gerald’s school life went near to costing Mr. Dawes his official position in the parish church. On the Tuesday mornings when Mr. Dawes was behind (not his usual, but) his proper time, Mr. Eversley’s impatience would not suffer him to sit down to breakfast before the arrival of the post; but he would walk as far, or nearly as far, as the green gate to meet him and take the letters--or one particular letter--from him; and Mrs. Eversley, as she waited for him--the most exact and punctual of men on other days--would see him walking slowly up the lane, poring eagerly, as if he had no other thought in the world, over the big boyish characters of the letter which he held in his hand, and apparently unconscious of his home or wife or breakfast. On one such occasion she remarked to the parlour-maid, who was putting the poached eggs down to the fire to keep them warm, that ‘she believed her master cared for nothing and nobody but that boy.’ Sometimes Mr. Eversley read the letters or parts of them to his wife; but always he numbered them, as he had numbered the first, on the envelopes and put them away carefully in his desk. The letters themselves were not altogether unworthy of Mr. Eversley’s devoted attention. They were frank natural letters, full of the details which are so wearisome if the heart of the reader is not at one with his who writes, but when they are at one, so delightful. Gerald related whatever interested him, and all that possessed an interest for him interested his father. Perhaps they differed a little from the ordinary letters of schoolboys, and were not the less attractive, by their freshness, as exhibiting the sense of wonderment or surprise which public-school life aroused in the boy who had never known anything like it before. There is always a charm in the narrative of one who observes the phenomena of Nature or Life as if no one had observed them before him. It is the charm of Homer’s similes.