Three generations

A SHY FATHER 125
the daughter most likely to have the information —
" Can you say when your mother is to be home ?"
My father, when his eighth child was born, was
thirty -four or thirty -five years of age. He was
habitually a grave and silent man in those days, by
no means without humour, but it was of a quiet, dry
kind, and only found its way at times through his
many burdens and worries.
While my father's word was law, so seldom was it
spoken, and so rarely did he interfere in our particular
concerns, though he took to the full a fatherly interest
in them, that I am at a loss to this day to understand
the degree of awe in which we children stood of him,
notwithstanding the fact that we ventured when he
was in the mood to argue with him, because we knew
that he liked to do so. We were able to recognize the
humour which underlay his silence and gravity, and
every now and then bubbled up in our hearing. We
knew that when he had leisure he would listen with
patience to our crudest notions. We were very
conscious of his alarmed and anxious tenderness
when illness attacked us. It occasioned a degree of
distress which his touch of shyness could not conceal.
After all, I believe it was that shadow of infectious
shyness which kept his children, while still young, at
a distance from him.
My father's natural reserve and taciturnity became
a grievance when we, too, were doomed to silence, as
in his love of reading he snatched a brief respite to
master his newspapers or his book in the midst of us
in the family sitting-room, where we all congregated ;
for he suffered from the not uncommon disadvantage
of not being able to keep his attention fixed on his
reading within earshot of a babel of youthful voices.