It is very remarkable that Ned had so much good in him as we find
there; in the first place, born as he seemed to be of a wild, vagrant
stock, a seedling sown by the breezes, and falling among the rocks and
sands; the growing up without a mother to cultivate his tenderness with
kisses and the inestimable, inevitable love of love breaking out on all
little occasions, without reference to merit or demerit, unfailing
whether or no; mother's faith in excellences, the buds which were yet
invisible to all other eyes, but to which her warm faith was the genial
sunshine necessary to their growth; mother's generous interpretation of
all that was doubtful in him, and which might turn out good or bad, according as should be believed of it; mother's pride in whatever the boy accomplished, and unfailing excuses, explanations, apologies, so satisfactory, for all his failures; mother's deep intuitive insight, which should see the permanent good beneath all the appearance of temporary evil, being wiser through her love than the wisest sage could be,--the dullest, homeliest mother than the wisest sage. The Creator, apparently, has set a little of his own infinite wisdom and love (which are one) in a mother's heart, so that no child, in the common course of things, should grow up without some heavenly instruction. Instead of all this, and the vast deal more that mothers do for children, there had been only the gruff, passionate Doctor, without sense of religion, with only a fitful tenderness, with years' length between the fits, so fiercely critical, so wholly unradiant of hope, misanthropic, savagely morbid. Yes; there was little Elsie too; it must have been that she was the boy's preserver, being childhood, sisterhood, womanhood, all that there had been for him of human life, and enough--he being naturally of such good stuff--to keep him good. He had lost much, but not all: he was not nearly what he might have been under better auspices; flaws and imperfections there were, in abundance, great uncultivated wastes and wildernesses in his moral nature, tangled wilds where there might have been stately, venerable religious groves; but there was no rank growth of evil. That unknown mother, that had no opportunity to nurse her boy, must have had gentle and noblest qualities to endow him with; a noble father, too, a long, unstained descent, one would have thought. Was this an almshouse child?
Doctor Grim knew, very probably, that there was all this on the womanly
side that was wanting to Ned's occasion; and very probably, too, being
a man not without insight, he was aware that tender treatment, as a
mother bestows it, tends likewise to foster strength, and manliness of
character, as well as softer developments; but all this he could not
have supplied, and now as little as ever. But there was something else
which Ned ought to have, and might have; and this was intercourse with
his kind, free circulation, free air, instead of the stived-up house, with the breeze from the graveyard blowing over it,--to be drawn out of himself, and made to share the life of many, to be introduced, at one remove, to the world with which he was to contend. To this end, shortly after the scene of passion and reconciliation above described, the Doctor took the resolution of sending Ned to an academy, famous in that day, and still extant. Accordingly they all three--the grim Doctor, Ned, and Elsie--set forth, one day of spring, leaving the house to crusty Hannah and the great spider, in a carryall, being the only excursion involving a night's absence that either of the two children remembered from the house by the graveyard, as at nightfall they saw the modest pine-built edifice, with its cupola and bell, where Ned was to be initiated into the schoolboy. The Doctor, remembering perhaps days spent in some gray, stately, legendary great school of England, instinct with the boyhood of men afterwards great, puffed forth a depreciating curse upon it; but nevertheless made all arrangements for Ned's behoof, and next morning prepared to leave him there.