“A store, indeed!” cried the young lady; “pomatum on your hair, and a grin on your face; snip, snip, snip, calico, ribbons, yard-stick; ’It’s very becoming, miss, that color; this is only a sample, only a remnant, but I shall have a new stock in by Friday; anything else, ma’am, today?’ Sho!  Philip, for a man!”

Fortunately for Philip there lived in the village an old waif, a scholarly oddity, uncommunicative, whose coming to dwell there had excited much gossip before the inhabitants got used to his odd ways.

Usually reticent and rough of speech—­the children thought he was an old bear—­he was nevertheless discovered to be kindly and even charitable in neighborhood emergencies, and the minister said he was about the most learned man he ever knew.  His history does not concern us, but he was doubtless one of the men whose talents have failed to connect with success in anything, who had had his bout with the world, and retired into peaceful seclusion in an indulgence of a mild pessimism about the world generally.

He lived alone, except for the rather neutral presence of Aunt Hepsy, who had formerly been a village tailoress, and whose cottage he had bought with the proviso that the old woman should continue in it as “help.”  With Aunt Hepsy he was no more communicative than with anybody else.  “He was always readin’, when he wasn’t goin’ fishin’ or off in the woods with his gun, and never made no trouble, and was about the easiest man to get along with she ever see.  You mind your business and he’ll mind his’n.”  That was the sum of Aunt Hepsy’s delivery about the recluse, though no doubt her old age was enriched by constant “study” over his probable history and character.  But Aunt Hepsy, since she had given up tailoring, was something of a recluse herself.

The house was full of books, mostly queer books, “in languages nobody knows what,” as Aunt Hepsy said, which made Philip open his eyes when he went there one day to take to the old man a memorandum-book which he had found on Mill Brook.  The recluse took a fancy to the ingenuous lad when he saw he was interested in books, and perhaps had a mind not much more practical than his own; the result was an acquaintance, and finally an intimacy—­at which the village wondered until it transpired that Philip was studying with the old fellow, who was no doubt a poor shack of a school-teacher in disguise.

It was from this gruff friend that Philip learned Greek and Latin enough to enable him to enter college, not enough drill and exact training in either to give him a high stand, but an appreciation of the literatures about which the old scholar was always enthusiastic.  Philip regretted all his life that he had not been severely drilled in the classics and mathematics, for he never could become a specialist in anything.  But perhaps, even in this, fate was dealing with him according to his capacities.  And, indeed, he had a greater respect for the scholarship of his wayside tutor than for the pedantic acquirements of many men he came to know afterwards.  It was from him that Philip learned about books and how to look for what he wanted to know, and it was he who directed Philip’s taste to the best.  When he went off to college the lad had not a good preparation, but he knew a great deal that would not count in the entrance examinations.