ABSTRACT
His mother was a rare storyteller, and he had inherited the gift from her. When I talked to him of literature his interest flagged, and he was either conventionally polite or mute. You could soon puzzle him with a familiar quotation, and Hardy was cheerfully indifferent should he fail to recall some well-known line of Shelley’s, which he did on one occasion. He was full of concrete happenings about his dwelling – of Farmer X and old Mother Brown and of the young girl in the draper’s shop. His eye kindled when speaking of these; but let the talk veer to literary values and he became a different man – a bored man (p. 22).
