Besides -- perhaps -- sometimes -- '' Uncle Dick broke off and stood in a brown study , looking at an old stump aflame with nasturtiums for fully three minutes . Later on I was to learn the significance of that pause and reverie . I spent the whole evening with Uncle Dick . After we had explored the garden he took me into his house and into his `` den . '' The house was a small white one and wonderfully neat inside , considering the fact that Uncle Dick was his own housekeeper . His `` den '' was a comfortable place , its one window so shadowed by a huge poplar that the room had a grotto-like effect of emerald gloom . I came to know it well , for , at Uncle Dick 's invitation , I did my studying there and browsed at will among his classics . We soon became close friends . Uncle Dick had always `` chummed with the masters , '' as he said , but our friendship went deeper . For my own part , I preferred his company to that of any young man I knew . There was a perennial spring of youth in Uncle Dick 's soul that yet had all the fascinating flavour of ripe experience . He was clever , kindly , humorous and , withal , so crystal clear of mind and heart that an atmosphere partaking of childhood hung around him . I knew Uncle Dick 's outward history as the Bayside people knew it . It was not a very eventful one . He had lost his father in boyhood ; before that there had been some idea of Dick 's going to college . After his father 's death he seemed quietly to have put all such hopes away and settled down to look after the farm and take care of his invalid stepmother . This woman , as I learned from others , but never from Uncle Dick , had been a peevish , fretful , exacting creature , and for nearly thirty years Uncle Dick had been a very slave to her whims and caprices . `` Nobody knows what he had to put up with , for he never complained , '' Mrs. Lindsay , my landlady , told me . `` She was out of her mind once and she was liable to go out of it again if she was crossed in anything . He was that good and patient with her .
She was dreadful fond of him too , XXXXX all she did almost worry his life out .
After Besides as at by for from in that to