In this life, of the devoted husbandman, he was evidently wholly contented; and he made it seem to Edwin the most natural and human on earth. The fascination of watching his uncle’s hands grew upon him, and in the end he would watch the man, who had been busy at the same work in his master’s garden all day, tending his own favourites at home until the light began to fail, and Aunt Sarah Jane would call the two of them in to supper. The spectacle had a sort of hypnotic effect upon the boy, it was so slow and measured, as slow almost, Edwin thought, as the processes of germination and growth which it was his uncle’s vocation to assist. His fingers even handled the purple soil as if he loved it. His cousin was a different matter altogether: a tall, dark-haired boy, a couple of years older than Edwin. He had, much more distinctly than Uncle Will, the Ingleby face, the features that were to be seen at their best in the old lady at the Holloway farm. And he possessed in a high degree the quality that had carried Edwin’s father out into the world: a seriousness that made him anxious to “get on,” promptings of which were now being satisfied in an accumulation of the periodical publications that have taken the place of Mr. Samuel Smiles in these days: weeklies devoted to all kinds of useful hobbies—electricity, wood-carving, plumbing—the series that eventually culminated in the gigantic illusion of the Self-Educator. To these short cuts to power the young man devoted all his evenings, and though he was quite natural in his anxiousness to be friendly with Edwin, with whose subtler and more contemplative nature he had at present so little in common, the attempts were not very successful. Between these two there lay a far more obvious gulf than that which separated Edwin from the older people. In a way, he could not help admiring his cousin’s earnestness, probably because he knew that he could never imitate it, and yet he sometimes found himself examining it in a mood of absolute detachment that made his sympathy feel artificial.