Thus he made the acquaintance of Fielding's novels, and one or two of Smollett's, and of Shakespeare's plays, and from all these he acquired standards of gentlemanly conduct and manners, and ideals of feminine beauty and charm, which standards and ideals kept him alike from close association with the raw youths of the neighborhood, and from succumbing to the primitive attractions of any of the farmers' daughters. Slowly and imperceptibly, by his reading and his thoughts, he was, if not fitting himself for a vastly different world from the one about him, at least unfitting himself for the latter. One cause of his strong attachment to Tom MacAlister, after he had come to regard that worthy in a more accurate light, and no longer idealized him as the half mythical hero of his childhood, was that Tom represented the great world of cities and courts. Tom was the son of a Scotch father and an Irish mother, and one of the two had a sufficient streak of English blood to account for Tom's length of chin. To his mixed ancestry was due his unique intermingling of brogues and accents. It was a question which was the greater, the severity of his visage or the drollery of his disposition. It was looked upon as a caprice of nature that a man of so sanctimonious an aspect should on occasion swear so hard, and that he who could drink so enormously of liquor should retain such meagreness of body. He advocated strict morality, though he admitted having himself been a sad lapser from virtue. He testified frankly to having broken "all the ten commandments and half a dozen more." He had been a great patron of the playhouses, could perform conjuring tricks, and was able to oppose a card-cheat with the latter's own weapons. As for religion, wherever he was, he took that, as he took the staple drink, "of the country," a practice which, he said, gave him in turn the benefit of all faiths, and saved him from a deal of inconvenience where piety ran strong. He had fought in 1743 with George II. against the French at Dettingen; "been out" with the Young Chevalier in 1745; followed Braddock to defeat in 1755; served under Frederick of Prussia, at Prague, Rossbach, and elsewhere; and had been under Prince Ferdinand, at Minden, in 1759. The disbandment of his regiment at the end of the Seven Years' War had put his services out of demand. In winter evenings, before the flaming logs in the great chimney-place, when Tom was not recounting adventures he had experienced, or some he had imagined, or playing the fiddle, or taking huge gulps of hard cider or hot "kill-devil," he was singing songs; and of these the favorite in his list was one or other of the versions of "Over the hills and far away." First, there was the song with which Dick had been familiar since his infancy, and which for a long time he thought alluded to MacAlister himself, beginning thus: