Roland and Jack were too much my seniors, and yet still too young, to take notice of me. But I could admire them from afar for their gifts and opportunities, their good looks, their bodily prowess, liberty, and apparent lack of all care. Their activities were mostly away from home, and rumours, probably, were incomplete. Roland ran and jumped at sports, rode a horse, sometimes into the yard, sometimes out to where the fox was hunted (a little beyond our range)—bicycled hither and thither—possessed a gun and used it, doubtless in a magnificent manner—dressed as he should be dressed—was more than once in trouble of some kind, I think in debt, and had once been observed by me in London walking with a dark lady of his own splendid breed, whom I never heard anything of, or saw again. What I first knew of Roland was—shortly after I began to frequent Abercorran House—a voice singing mightily in the bathroom:  
 
“Foul fall the hand that bends the steel
Around the courser’s thundering heel,
That e’er shall print a sable wound
On fair Glamorgan’s velvet ground.”
Never afterwards did he do anything that fell short of the name Roland, to which the noble war-song, at that moment, fixed its character for ever. Jack and he had been to a famous school until they were sixteen, and did no good there. Indoors they learnt very little more than a manner extremely well suited to hours of idleness. Out of doors they excelled at the more selfish sports, at athletics, boxing, sculling, shooting. So they had come home and, as Mr Morgan had nothing to suggest, they had done what suggested itself.
 
You could see Mr Morgan thinking as he watched the two, undecided whether it was best to think with or without the cigar, which he might remove for a few seconds, perhaps without advantage, for it was replaced with evident satisfaction. But he was thinking as he stood there, pale, rigid, and abstracted. Then perhaps Roland would do or say something accompanied by a characteristic free, bold, easy gesture, turning on his heel; and the father gave up thinking, to laugh heartily, and as likely as[256] not step forward to enter the conversation, or ask Roland about the dogs, or what he had been doing in the past week. “Had a good time? ... suits you?... Ha, ha, ... Well, this will never do, I must be going. Good-bye, good-bye. Don’t forget to look in and see how mother is.”
 
He had only gone upstairs to the Library to open one of the new reviews which, except where they caught the sunshine, remained so new. He and his two elder sons always parted with a laugh. Either he manœuvred for it, or as soon as the good laugh arrived he slipped away lest worse might befall. He saw clearly enough that “they had no more place in London than Bengal tigers,” as he said one day to Mr Stodham: “They ought to have been in the cavalry. But they aren’t—curse it—what is to be done? Why could I not breed clerks?” The immediate thing to be done was to light the suspended cigar. It was lucky if the weather just at that time took a fine turn; if Harry and Lewis, for a wonder, were persuaded to spend all day and every day at school; if Mrs Morgan was away in Wales; if Jessie’s voice was perfect, singing
 
“The cuckoo is a merry bird ...”
I recall such a time. The wall-flower had[257] turned out to be just the mixture of blood colour and lemon that Mr Morgan liked best. The water-lilies were out on the pond. The pigeons lay all along under the roof ridge, too idle to coo except by mistake or in a dream. Jack and Roland were working hard at some machinery in the yard. The right horse, it seems, had won the Derby.
 
On the evenings in such a season Philip and I had to bring to light the fishing-tackle, bind hooks on gut and gimp, varnish the binding, mix new varnish, fit the rods together, practise casting in the Wilderness, with a view to our next visit, which would be in August, to my aunt Rachel’s at Lydiard Constantine. There would be no eggs to be found so late, except a few woodpigeons’, linnets’, and swallows’, but these late finds in the intervals of fishing—when it was too hot, for example—had a special charm. The nuts would be ripe before we left.... On these evenings we saw only the fishing things, the Wilderness, and Lydiard Constantine.
 
This weather was but a temporary cure for Mr Morgan’s curiosity as to what Jack and Roland were to do. You could tell that he was glad to see Roland’s face again, home from Canada with some wolf skins after a six months’[258] absence; but it was not enough. The fellow had been in an office once for a much shorter period. The one thing to draw him early from bed was hunting. Well, but he was a fine fellow. How should all the good in him be employed? It could not be left to the gods; and yet assuredly the gods would have their way.
 
Everybody else did something. Aurelius earned a living, though his hands proclaimed him one who was born neither to toil nor spin. Higgs, too, did no one knew what, but something that kept him in tobacco and bowler hats, in the times when he was not fishing in the Wilderness or looking after his pigeons in the yard............