From that time the transformation of Hector’s blockhouse apartment into a library, and himself into a book-worm, proceeded apace; weekly consignments of military works thenceforth arrived, and, the heart having been torn out of them, were thrown aside and looked at no more.
In his youth Graeme had been sickly, and on that account had not been sent to a public, or even a private, school, his mental training having been entrusted to governesses and tutors, whose instructions were on no account to force the lad’s inclinations, with the result that he grew up practically uneducated. He had managed to scrape through the necessary army examinations, but this was due rather to a certain "crammer’s" uncanny knowledge of his art than to any proficiency on the part of the pupil, and a few months after the undergoing of his ordeal Hector’s mind had once more relapsed into its former happy state of ignorance, in which condition it had remained till the present time.
Fortunately for him, the mental ground thus left fallow had never been weakened by the rank growth springing from the assiduous reading of novels, and the soil was ready and hungry for such seeds as he might choose to sow. In a very few months—though yawning at times over their dulness—he had easily mastered the contents of the dry and unimaginative text-books. This done and duty satisfied, he thereupon indulged to the full his own peculiar bent for character study, as exemplified in the biographies of the world’s great commanders.
These he read from cover to cover, no longer yawning, but eagerly taking in the smallest details; indeed, it was chiefly on the trivial incidents of childish life—revealing, nevertheless, the true unalterable character of the subject—that Hector would dwell, marking as he went the paragraphs in which these particulars were described.
Now, to read with the object of acquiring information is one thing; but to read in order to discover a resemblance between yourself and the subject of a biography is quite another, and a most dangerous one, especially for those to whose nature the abnormal appeals, the inevitable result being an unconscious desire to make the resemblance complete, even to the smallest and most objectionable details.
