My life - v. 2 Author:Alfred Russel Wallace Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: w'me -whenever he had the opportunity; and during some years at Hertford he rented a garden about half a mile away, in order to grow vegetables and have some who... more »lesome exercise. He had had some injury to one of his ankles which often continued to trouble him, and gave him a slight lameness, and in consequence of this he never took very long walks. He was rather precise and regular in his habits, quiet and rather dignified in manners, and somewhat of what is termed a gentleman of the old school. Of course, he always wore a top-hat—a beaver hat as it was then called, before silk hats were invented—the only other headgear being sometimes a straw hat for use in the garden in summer. In character he was quiet and even-tempered, very religious in the orthodox Church-of-England way, and with such a reliance on Providence as almost to amount to fatalism. He was fond of reading, and through reading clubs or lending libraries we usually had some of the best books of travel or biography in the house. Some of these my father would read to us in the evening, and when Bowdler's edition of Shakespeare came out he obtained it, and often read a play to the assembled family. In this way I made my first acquaintance with Lear and Cordelia, with Malvolio and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, with the thrilling drama of the Merchant of Venice, with Hamlet, with Lady Macbeth, and other masterpieces. At one time my father wrote a good deal, and we were told it was a history of Hertford, or at other times some religious work; but they never got finished, and I do not think they would ever have been worth publishing, his character not leading him to do any such work with sufficient thoroughness. He dabbled a little in antiquities and in heraldry, but did nothing systematic, and though he had fair mental ability he...« less