To Call Her Mine Author:Walter Besant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE FIRST DREAM. At half-past four exactly, Mr. Leighan, of Gratnor, commonly called Daniel Leighan, or Old Dan, or Mr. Daniel, according to t... more »he social position of those who spoke of him, awoke with a start from his afternoon nap. Mr. Leighan always took his dinner at one ; after his dinner, he took a tumbler of brandy-and-water hot, with two lumps of sugar and a slice of lemon—as his grandfather had done before him, only that the ancestral drink was rum, and the brew was called "punch." With the glass of'brandy-and-water he took a pipe of tobacco. This brought him. regularly and exactly, to half-past two. He then knocked out the ashes, laid down his pipe, pulled his silk handkerchief over his head—which kept off the draught in winter and flies in summer—and went to sleep till half- past four, when he woke up and had his tea. This was his way of spending the afternoon. He had never varied that way, even when he was a young man and active ; and now he would never attempt to vary it, for he was old and paralyzed ; and he passed his days wholly sitting in a high-backed arm-chair, with pillows and cushions at the back and sides, and a stool for his feet. From eight in the morning until nine in the evening he lived in that chair and in that room. There was always a wood fire burning in the grate, even on such a hot summer day as this ; for Challacombe is a thousand feet above the level of the sea, and the clouds roll up the valleys of the Teign and the Bovey from the sea, or they roll down from the Tors and the Downs, and envelop it ; so that half the year one lives in cloud. This makes it a damp and trying air, so that the domestic hearth at Challacombe is like the Altar of Vesta, being never quenched even in July and August. Old Dan—we all belong, I am sure, to ...« less