Later, between nine and half-past, Henry was sitting with his father and his uncle, smoking and drinking after dinner. To-night was an evening of Ceremony—_the_ Family Ceremony of the year—therefore, although the meal had been an extremely festive one with many flowers, a perfect mountain of fruit in the huge silver bowl in the centre of the table, and the Most Sacred Of All Ports (produced on this occasion and Christmas Day) nevertheless only the Family had been present. No distant relations even, certainly no friends.... This was Grandfather Trenchard’s birthday. The ladies vanished, there remained only Henry, his father and Uncle Tim. Henry was sitting there, very self-conscious over his glass of Port. He was always self-conscious when Uncle Tim was present. Uncle Tim was a Faunder and was large-limbed and absent-minded like Henry’s father. Uncle Tim had a wild head of grey hair, a badly-kept grey beard and clothed his long, loose figure in long, loose garments. He was here to-day and gone to-morrow, preferred the country to the town and had a little house down in Glebeshire, where he led an untidy bachelor existence whose motive impulses were birds and flowers. Henry was very fond of Uncle Tim; he liked his untidiness, his careless geniality, his freedom and his happiness. Henry’s father—George Trenchard—was “splendid”—that, thought Henry, was the only possible word—and the boy, surveying other persons’ fathers, wondered why Katherine, Millicent, and himself should have been chosen out of all the world to be so favoured. George Trenchard, at this time about sixty years of age, was over six feet in height and broad in proportion. He was growing too stout; his hair was grey and the top of his head bald; his eyes were brown and absent-minded, his mouth large with a lurking humour in its curves; his cheeks were fat and round and there was the beginning of a double chin. He walked, always, in a rambling, rolling kind of way, like a sea-captain on shore, still balancing himself to the swing of his vessel, his hands deep sunk in his trouser-pockets. Henry had been privileged, sometimes, to see him, when, absorbed in the evolution of an essay or the Chapter of some book (he is, of course, one of our foremost authorities on the early Nineteenth Century period of English Literature, especially Hazlitt and De Quincey) he rolled up and down his study, with his head back, his hand sunk in his pockets, whistling a little tune ... very wonderful he seemed to Henry then.