第5章

The boy was old enough to do without female assistance, so I set to work to hunt up a suitable male attendant.With some difficulty I succeeded in hiring a most respectable round-faced young man, who had been a helper in a hunting-stable, but who said that he was one of a family of seventeen and well accustomed to the ways of children, and professed himself quite willing to undertake the charge of Master Leo when he arrived.Then, having taken the iron box to town, and with my own hands deposited it at my banker's, I bought some books upon the health and management of children, and read them, first to myself, and then aloud to Jobthat was the young man's nameand waited.

At length the child arrived in the charge of an elderly person, who wept bitterly at parting with him, and a beautiful boy he was.Indeed, I do not think that I ever saw such a perfect child before or since.

His eyes were gray, his forehead broad, and his face, even at that early age, clean cut as a cameo, without being pinched or thin.But perhaps his most attractive point was his hair, which was pure gold in color and tightly curled over his shapely head.He cried a little when his nurse finally tore herself away and left him with us.Never shall I forget the scene.

There he stood, with the sunlight from the window playing upon his golden curls, his fist screwed in one eye, while he took us in with the other.I was seated in a chair, and stretched out my hand to him to induce him to come to me, while Job, in the corner, was making a sort of clucking noise, which, arguing from his previous experience, or from the analogy of the hen, he judged would have a soothing effect, and inspire confidence in the youthful mind, and running a wooden horse of peculiar hideousness backward and forward in a way that was little short of inane.This went on for some minutes, and then all of a sudden the lad stretched out both his little arms and ran to me.

"I like you," he said; "you is ugly, but you is good."Ten minutes afterwards he was eating large slices of bread-and-butter, with every sign of satisfaction; Job wanted to put jam on to them, but I sternly reminded him of the excellent works we had read, and forbade it.

In a very little while (for, as I expected, I got my fellowship) the boy became the favorite of the whole collegewhere, all orders and regulations to the contrary notwithstanding, he was continually in and outa sort of chartered libertine, in whose favor all rules were relaxed.The offerings made at his shrine were simply without number, and I had a serious difference of opinion with one old resident Fellow, now long dead, who was usually supposed to be the crustiest man in the university, and to abhor the sight of a child.And yet I discovered, when a frequently recurring fit of sickness had forced Job to keep a strict lookout, that this unprincipled old man was in the habit of enticing the boy to his rooms and there feeding him upon unlimited quantities of brandy-balls, and making him promise to say nothing about it.

Job told him that he ought to be ashamed of himself, "at his age, too, when he might have been a grandfather if he had done what was right," by which Job understood had got married, and thence arose the row.