Some portion of each day he spent at the
offices of a certain Company, which held rule in a British colony of
considerable importance. His interest in this colony had originated
at the time when he was gaining vigour and enlarging his experience
in world-wide travel; he enjoyed the sense of power, and his voice
did not lack weight at the Board of the Company in question. He had
all manner of talents and pursuits. Knowledge--the only kind of
knowledge he cared for, that of practical things, things alive in
the world of to-day--seemed to come to him without any effort on
his part. A new invention concealed no mysteries from him; he looked
into it; understood, calculated its scope. A strange piece of news
from any part of the world found him unsurprised, explanatory. He
liked mathematics, and was wont to say jocosely that an abstract
computation had a fine moral affect, favouring unselfishness. Music
was one of his foibles; he learnt an instrument with wonderful
facility, and, up to a certain point, played well. For poetry,
though as a rule he disguised the fact, he had a strong distaste;
once, when aged about twenty, he startled his father by observing
that "In Memoriam" seemed to him a shocking instance of wasted
energy; he would undertake to compress the whole significance of
each section, with its laborious rhymings, into two or three lines
of good clear prose.
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