Yet there was no doubt about the fact that he was an odd character. The incarnation of bashfulness, he was, like most bashful persons, persistent and consistent in doing just exactly as he liked so far as the demands of a world, not primarily constituted for people of his stripe, allowed. It must be confessed that, in modern parlance, he got away with it pretty successfully.

Probably this was because he was wise enough not to demand very much. It did not seem that either the rise and fall of nations or of the stock market gave him very much concern. Doubtless he did not disturb himself greatly over the question of who was to be the next president. His chief worry seemed to be the weather, though why he should have troubled himself about this, when most of his life was spent indoors, remains a mystery. Memory seems to recall some story of ill-health in early life which perhaps inculcated a habit of consulting weather conditions that lasted as long as life itself—and he lived to a green old age.

The spacious brick mansion that was his home stood sideways, as it were, to the street, behind a tall fence with panelled posts and blunt, rounded pickets, like large broomsticks of alternating heights. Both the main front door and what we should now call the service entrance were reached by a gravelled driveway with a flag walk beside it that terminated around in the rear of the house at the stable. Narrow flights of steps with wrought-iron railings, topped here and there with brass balls, led to the two doors.

The entrance hall was almost square, a passage way running off toward the kitchen from the left-hand farther corner and the staircase ascending on one's left as one entered. At the landing, halfway up, was a large window, opening to the north, which illumined the hall and stair-well with an even, rather bare light. Somewhere in the wall was a recess in which stood a bust of Cicero, of which the eyes, formed without indication of the pupils after the fashion of its period of sculpture, gave an effect of blindness fascinating to the childish imagination.

On the right was a little room where Mr. Tatlock's sister, a dear old lady who always wore a little flat lace cap with a black bow, generally sat knitting. Straight ahead was the parlor where occasionally, when Mr. Tatlock's niece was visiting at the house, there were subdued children's parties. On these occasions he was never visible. His own room was the library, east of the parlor, with a southern exposure toward the garden.

Here we never entered, but once or twice we caught a glimpse of the interior through the door left unguardedly open by some momentary oversight. The picture thus presented had as its background the south wall of the room with its two windows between which stood the chimney piece. Above the mantle, which was supported by miniature Ionic columns, hung a portrait of a gentleman with a great deal of hair and shirt frill, and below a bright fire burned, partly concealed by a fire screen, beside which, reading in a large easy chair, was Mr. Tatlock. Recollection is still vivid of the startled, rather furtive glance, the look of a timid animal whose place of refuge had been discovered, directed toward us as we peeked in.

What was the old man reading as he sat there day after day and year after year, while presidents were elected, national policies inaugurated and abandoned, the maps of the world changed here and there, automobiles invented, and the children grew up, went to college, got married and left the old street? Probably no one knows for a certainty, but we should be willing to guess that his favorites were Burke, the Spectator, Boswell's Johnson, Pope, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and perhaps Gibbon. Did he, we wonder, ever read a novel? If so, it is doubtful whether he got much beyond Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell.

The house had a lovely old garden that stretched away to the east, down a slope that was broken into two or three terraces. At the eastward end was a level portion where the box-lined gravel walk from the house made a circle around an old oak tree under which was a bench. There were a good many old fashioned flowers and shrubs in the garden and some pear trees, but who took care of the pruning and gardening, except Mr Tatlock's sister who assuredly could not do it all, is still unexplained.

There was a hired man whom we called "Mister" O'Neil who sometimes went to the post office and may have done other errands, but as his title implies he seems to have been above gardening. At any rate there is no recollection of seeing him at work in the garden. In spite of his name there was nothing in his appearance that indicated Irish extraction. He was not a hired man at all in the New England sense; he was more the type of the confidential servant of the English novelists. He was dark, wore a beard, dressed habitually in black and looked like a particularly doleful undertaker.

We never saw Mr. Tatlock and "Mister" O'Neil together and yet imagination—perhaps it is only imagination—somehow groups them as a pair of confidants. In a way their characteristics were similar. Both were inscrutable, quiet persons, content to remain in the background. For all of them the world might wag. In our imaginations at least, "Mister" O'Neil knew all about Mr. Tatlock. He accepted the other's peculiar reticences, so like his own, as a matter of course; he knew his innocent secrets; he even could tell, if he wished, what books he read there before the fire that burned from September to June. With this taciturn individual we doubted if Mr. Tatlock was bashful. Possibly their mutual congeniality of temperament centered about the furnace, for they both watched it.

"Mister" O'Neil could have revealed, we believe, what the shock was that we all decided Mr. Tatlock must have received early in life. The girls were convinced that this shock was emotional—an unhappy love affair, or the death of some dear friend. The boys, on the other hand, were inclined to talk about a purely physical catastrophe—a runaway accident, perhaps, or a blow on the head from a highway robber. For all of these surmises we had not the slightest foundation, except in fancy, and mature reflection leads to the conclusion that probably we were entirely in error. It seems now much more likely that this old bachelor's oddities were due to life-long frail health.

And yet one can never be sure and somehow one glimpse of Mr. Tatlock which it was permitted one of the children to catch hinted, inexplicably and without any particular warrant, at other possibilities. It was the only out-of-door memory of him that is left. The boy, who still remembers well that spring day, was in the next yard, hanging over the fence looking into Mr. Tatlock's garden when he suddenly became aware that Mr. Tatlock himself was sitting on the bench in the circle the path made around the old tree. The old gentleman did not see the small spectator who had been betrayed into an unaccustomed quietness by the absence of companions and some subtle and unacknowledged influence of the first warm afternoon of the year.

Nothing whatever happened, Mr. Tatlock sat there, looking up from time to time at the young leaves above him, tapping his stick on the soft turf and smiling to himself. Of what long-gone springs was he dreaming? It was clear that whatever his thoughts were, they were happy ones.

Probably to most boys the ideal life is one that comprises "the joy of eventful living." Here for the first time it dawned upon this youthful interloper that one could be happy in quietness and seclusion. There were, it appeared, certain satisfactions in other careers than those of the cowboy and the soldier. Up to this time the boy had never been able to understand why heaven was so often spoken of as a place of rest. He did not understand wholly now, but a later comprehension had here its inception.

And so let us remember Mr. Tatlock sitting, lost in meditation, in his garden. After all he was not without influence in his environment, unobtrusive soul that he was. He made himself felt in his little world. He counted. The boy who watched him over the fence that day thought of him again when he read in a recent essay: "The truth is that a man's life is the expression of his temperament and that what eventually matters is his attitude and relation to life .... not only his performance."