He was perfectly
well shaped but unusually devoid of physical strength. He got a fair
share of this in after life, but it came much later with him than with
other boys, and at the time of which I am writing he was a mere little
skeleton. He wanted something to develop his arms and chest without
knocking him about as much as the school games did. To supply this want
by some means which should add also to his pleasure was Alethea's first
anxiety. Rowing would have answered every purpose, but unfortunately
there was no river at Roughborough.
Whatever it was to be, it must be something which he should like as much
as other boys liked cricket or football, and he must think the wish for
it to have come originally from himself; it was not very easy to find
anything that would do, but ere long it occurred to her that she might
enlist his love of music on her side, and asked him one day when he was
spending a half-holiday at her house whether he would like her to buy an
organ for him to play on. Of course, the boy said yes; then she told him
about her grandfather and the organs he had built. It had never entered
into his head that he could make one, but when he gathered from what his
aunt had said that this was not out of the question, he rose as eagerly
to the bait as she could have desired, and wanted to begin learning to
saw and plane so that he might make the wooden pipes at once.
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