CLEAR WATERS 



genius. Nature, I am quite certain, meant him for 

 one, and then disgusted with his utter indifference to 

 her approaches, changed her mind. I have a printed 

 metrical, pseudo-classical drama of his written when 

 he was twenty, and staged amateurly in the town hall 

 of a considerable provincial town with success. The 

 cadence and the language suggest a precocious youth, 

 soaked in the classics and the English poets. But a 

 brief fourth-form career at a public school and a year 

 or two of the same stamp with tutors brought his 

 education to an end at sixteen, and was all he ever had 

 or, it must be owned, he seemed to want. But for a 

 desultory dip, perhaps, into Shakespeare or Tennyson, 

 I don't believe he opened another book worth reading 

 for the rest of his Hfe. Very, very occasionally, he 

 wrote an article or poem which was generally accepted 

 in rather fastidious quarters. He came into some 

 money, and men unworthy to black his boots lived on 

 it, till he died — and that was aU ! The only thing he 

 could ever stick to was the back of a buck-jumper. 

 There was a good deal, I fancy, of the Lindsay Gordon 

 about him without the maturity. But there is infinite 

 allowance to be made for a brilliant, lovable, im- 

 petuous nature, born by some freak into a gloomy, 

 rigid, Calvinistic family, and of course destroyed by it. 

 I have implied that the lodgings in bygone Towyn, 

 select though it may have been, were Spartan. Our 

 landlady, Mrs. Jellybag Jones, made up in a measure for 

 the meagreness of her accommodation, the element- 

 ary nature of her cooking, and the rather dispropor- 

 tionate scale of her terms, by her personal quaHties. 

 She was cheery and motherly to a degree, like most 

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