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 Against this effect of nature, stark naked in all its repulsiveness and beauty, worked the "cultural" influence of the mother, and not entirely in vain. The prospect of a sheltered, gentle childhood greeted the baby Hardy, sunned daily in a pretty flower-garden. Pleasant, amusing folktales, artificially shorn of all traces of brutality or grotesquerie, were related to him as soon as he could understand a tale. From the servants in the house, at the same time, the growing infant probably heard or overheard the same tales in their older and coarser form, and told in the inimitable dialect which suited them so well—delicious dialect also, its employment being proscribed.

Of religion, the child likewise learned from his mother the sweet New Testament parables and the more moral of the Mosaic episodes. The latter attracted him more, being more in harmony with the sad, stern music of the Heath, which he soon learned to love more than the regimented beauty of nature under botanical cultivation. Occasionally the household journeyed in a body to Dorchester of a Sunday, to sniff the cosmopolitan air of the town and to attend divine service at St. Peter's. Here the boy encountered companions, of his own age and also somewhat older, who instilled in him the seeds of that queer pragmatic view of Scriptural authority which was peculiar to the Wessex mind. And, inasmuch as few of the Bockhampton Hardys were exactly notorious for their religious orthodoxy, these seeds were permitted to grow their heretical fruit without opposition. Still, the Christian religion, as established by the Church of England, was there; it was to be accepted, with whatever