We’d got a few books, and there was the papers, of course, so she used to read to him by the hour together. He was very fond of hearing about things, and, like a good many men that can’t read and write, he was clever enough in his own way. When she’d done all the newspapers—they were old ones (we took care not to get any fresh ones, for fear she’d see about Hagan and the others)—she used to read about battles and sea-fights to him; he cared about them more than anything, and one night, after her reading to him about the battle of Trafalgar, he turned round to her and says,“I ought to have been in that packet, Ailie, my girl. I was near going for a sailor once, on board a man-o’-war, too. I tried twice to get away to sea, that was before I’d snared my first hare, and something stopped me both times. Once I was fetched back and flogged, and pretty nigh starved. I never did no good afterwards. But it’s came acrost me many and many a time that I’d been a different sort o’ chap if I’d had my will then. I was allays fond o’ work, and there couldn’t be too much fightin’ for me; so a man-o’-war in those days would have been just the thing to straighten me. That was the best chance I ever had. Well, I don’t say as I haven’t had others—plenty in this country, and good ones, too; but it was too late—I’d got set. When a man’s young, that’s the time he can be turned right way or wrong. It’s none so easy afterwards.”

He went to sleep then, and Aileen said that was the only time he ever spoke to her in that way. We never heard him talk like that, nor nobody else, I expect.

If we could have got some things out of our heads, that was the pleasantest time ever we spent in the Hollow. After father could be left by himself for a few hours we got out the horses, and used to take Aileen out for long rides all over the place, from one end to the other. It did her good, and we went to every hole and corner in it. She was never tired of looking at the great rock towers, as we used to call ‘em, where the sandstone walls hung over, just like the pictures of castles, till, Starlight said, in the evenings you could fancy you saw flags waving and sentinels walking up and down on them.