He often heard people say that his father was a great scholar. The vicar was always silent and preoccupied, sometimes deep in his books, sometimes scribbling away with a busy pen, a litter of papers scattered all over the floor about him, and his wig pushed back awry from his smooth, round forehead; sometimes walking up and down the garden paths with his hands clasped behind his back, his head bent forward, and his eyes fixed on the ground. He used especially to walk thus while he was formulating in his mind the outlines of one of the pamphlets he used to write. Jack could not imagine that any one so absorbed in his books and his studies could ever have been the hero of such romance. And then he always seemed so very, very old to Jack. It was hard to imagine that such a dry and sapless life could ever have had the ichor of romance flowing through it. Before Janet had come to Stalbridge she had been one of the dependents of the other Ballisters. “They be grand, grand folks,” she would sometimes say, “and hold their heads as high as ever the Duke of Newcastle himself.” She sometimes told Jack that if his father had not set his family all against him, he might have been a bishop as like as not. “I’d never come to Stalbridge only for your mother, poor soul,” said she. “But she was fond of me, and I was fond of her, and so I came.” It seemed to Jack that he could hardly remember the time when his father did not teach him Latin and Greek. One of his first recollections as a little, little boy was of his father teaching him the Greek alphabet. He learned little or nothing else than the two languages, and it is not likely that his father thought anything else was worth learning. Jack once overheard the vicar say to old Sir Thomas Harding, “Sir, I will make the boy the best scholar in England.” The words remained fixed in Jack’s memory as such fragmentary speeches do sometimes fix themselves, for no especial reason, in the mind of boyhood. The promise of great scholarship was, however, never to be fulfilled, for Jack was only fourteen years old when the vicar died, and in the neglected two years at Southampton he never went to school a day, or studied six words of a lesson, or read a page of Greek or Latin, except one or two times when Mr. Stetson made him read a passage or two of Greek as a matter of curiosity. Jack’s father never said anything to him about his mother or his relations. His uncle Tipton had come up from Southampton just before his father’s death, but that was the only time that Jack had ever really seen one of his own kindred.