One important principle, of fruit afterwards in his Roman life, that relish for the country fixed deeply in him; in the winters especially, when the sufferings of [22] the animal world became so palpable even to the least observant.

It fixed in him a sympathy for all creatures, for the almost human troubles and sicknesses of the flocks, for instance.

It was a feeling which had in it something of religious veneration for life as such--for that mysterious essence which man is powerless to create in even the feeblest degree.

One by one, at the desire of his mother, the lad broke down his cherished traps and springes for the hungry wild birds on the salt marsh.

A white bird, she told him once, looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry in his bosom across a crowded public place--his own soul was like that! Would it reach the hands of his good genius on the opposite side, unruffled and unsoiled?
And as his mother became to him the very type of maternity in things, its unfailing pity and protectiveness, and maternity itself the central type of all love;--so, that beautiful dwelling-place lent the reality of concrete outline to a peculiar ideal of home, which throughout the rest of his life he seemed, amid many distractions of spirit, to be ever seeking to regain.
And a certain vague fear of evil, constitutional in him, enhanced still further this sentiment of home as a place of tried security.