"Friend of my
youth," he added--addressing me, "and"--addressing Foe--"prop, sole
prop, of my declining years--as you love me, be cruel to be kind and
restrain me when I show a disposition to kiss yon bearded guard."
As the tail of the train swung out of the station Foe said
meditatively, "I like that boy," . . . And so it was. That autumn,
when Jimmy Collingwood, having achieved a pass degree--"by means," as
he put it, "only known to myself"--came up to share my chambers and
read for the Bar, he and Foe struck up a warm affection. For once,
moreover, Foe broke his habit of keeping his friends in separate
cages. He was too busy a man to join us often; but when we met we
were the Three Musketeers.
My father died in the Autumn of 1906; and this kept me down in the
country until the New Year; although he had left his affairs as
straight as a balance-sheet. Death duties and other things. . . .
His account-books, note-books, filed references and dockets;
his diaries kept, for years back, with records of rents and
tithe-charges, of farms duly visited and crops examined field by
field; appraisements of growing timber, memoranda for new plantings,
queer charitable jottings about his tenants, their families,
prospects, and ways to help them; all this tally, kept under God's
eye by one who had never suffered man to interfere with him, gave my
Radicalism a pretty severe jerk.
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