"Everybody loves that child," said Janet. It was true. As far back as that, under God knows what guidance, he was laying his anchor deep for the days of storm and tempest.
During his earlier years he saw little of his father, but every evening after his bath he was taken into the Library to bid Good-night to him, and then the Deemster would lift him up to the picture to bid Good-night to his mother also.
"You must love and worship her all your life, darling. I'll tell you why, some day."
He was a born gipsy, often being lost in the broad plantations about the house, and then turning up with astonishing stories of the distances he had travelled.
"I didn't went no farther nor Ramsey to-day, mother"--seven miles as the crow flies.
He was born a poet too, and after the Deemster had made a "Limerick" on his Christian name, he learnt to rhyme to the same measure, making quatrains almost as rapidly as he could speak, though often with strange words of his own compounding. Thus he celebrated his pet lamb, his kid, his rabbits, the rooks on the lawn, and particularly a naughty young pony his father had given him, who "lived in the fiel'" and whom he "wanted to go to Peel," but whenever he went out to fetch her she "always kicked up her heel." Janet thought this marvellous, miraculous. It was a gift! The little prophet Samuel might have been more saintly but he couldn't have been more wonderful.
Janet was not the only one to be impressed. It is known now that day by day the Deemster copied the boy's rhymes, with much similar matter, into a leather-bound book which he had labelled strangely enough, "Isabel's Diary." He kept this secret volume under lock and key, and it was never seen by anyone else until years afterwards, when, in a tragic hour, the childish jingles in the Judge's sober handwriting, under the eyes that looked at them, burnt like flame and cut like a knife.
It was remarked by Janet that the Deemster's affection for the child grew greater, while the expression of it became less as the years went on. "Is the boy up yet?" would be the first word he would say when she took his early tea to him in the morning; and if a long day in the Courts kept him from home until after the child had been put to bed, he would never sit down until he had gone upstairs to look at the little one in his cot.