They even
joked about my name, averring that names assuredly must go by
contraries, for I was Bold by name, and timid by nature. The joke
seemed to me, even then, a very poor one, for a boy must have the
name he is born with, and I have known very delicate and
white-handed folk of the name of Smith.
Mr. Ellery, a bachelor, as I have said, adopted me when my own
father and mother died, which happened when I was still an infant
and, mercifully, too young to understand my loss. My father, as I
called him, was a substantial yeoman whose farm and holding lay
some three miles on the English side of Shrewsbury. He was well on
in years when he adopted me, and dwells in my memory as a strong,
silent man who, when his day's work was done, would sit in the
inglenook with a book upon his knees. This taste for reading marked
him out from the neighboring farmers, with whom, indeed, he had
little in common in any way, so that he was rather respected than
liked by them. But he was wonderfully kind to me, and if my love
for him was qualified with awe, it was from reverence, and not from
fear.
My frail appearance, on which the neighbors jested, caused my
father to look on me sometimes with an anxious eye, and he would
question the housekeeper and the maids about my appetite, and
whether I slept well o' nights. On these matters he need not have
had any concern, since I ate four hearty meals a day, with perhaps
an apple or a hunk of bread in between; while as for sleeping,
Mistress Pennyquick was wont to declare, five out of the seven
mornings in the week, when she woke me, that she knew I would sleep
my brains away.
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