He was inclined to think that his acquaintance
could not be the Miss Eldredge, of whose beauty he had heard many tales
among the people of the neighborhood. The other young lady, a tall,
reserved, fair-haired maiden, answered the description considerably
better. He concluded, therefore, that his acquaintance must be a visitor,
perhaps a dependent and companion; though the freedom of her thought,
action, and way of life seemed hardly consistent with this idea. However,
this slight incident served to give him a sort of connection with the
family, and he could but hope that some further chance would introduce
him within what he fondly called his hereditary walls. He had come to
think of this as a dreamland; and it seemed even more a dreamland now
than before it rendered itself into actual substance, an old house of
stone and timber standing within its park, shaded about with its
ancestral trees.
But thus, at all events, he was getting himself a little wrought into the
net-work of human life around him, secluded as his position had at first
seemed to be, in the farmhouse where he had taken up his lodgings. For,
there was the Hospital and its old inhabitants, in whose monotonous
existence he soon came to pass for something, with his liveliness of
mind, his experience, his good sense, his patience as a listener, his
comparative youth even--his power of adapting himself to these stiff and
crusty characters, a power learned among other things in his political
life, where he had acquired something of the faculty (good or bad as
might be) of making himself all things to all men.
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