and judged the hearts of others, most of all of his brother's son,
by his own. He had often thought whether, in case of Elsie's dying or
being necessarily doomed to seclusion, he might not adopt this nephew and
make him his heir; but it had not occurred to him that Richard might wish
to become his son-in-law for the sake of his property.

It is very easy to criticise other people's modes of dealing with their
children. Outside observers see results; parents see processes. They
notice the trivial movements and accents which betray the blood of this
or that ancestor; they can detect the irrepressible movement of
hereditary impulse in looks and acts which mean nothing to the common
observer. To be a parent is almost to be a fatalist. This boy sits with
legs crossed, just as his uncle used to whom he never saw; his
grandfathers both died before he was born, but he has the movement of the
eyebrows which we remember in one of them, and the gusty temper of three
different generations, can tell pretty nearly the range of possibilities
and the limitations of a child, actual or potential, of a given
stock,--errors excepted always, because children of the same stock are
not bred just alike, because the traits of some less known ancestor are
liable to break out at any time, and because each human being has, after
all, a small fraction of individuality about him which gives him a
flavor, so that he is distinguishable from others by his friends or in a
court of justice, and which occasionally makes a genius or a saint or a
criminal of him. It is well that young persons cannot read these fatal
oracles of Nature. Blind impulse is her highest wisdom, after all. We
make our great jump, and then she takes the bandage off our eyes. That
is the way the broad sea-level of average is maintained, and the
physiological democracy is enabled to fight against the principle of
selection which would disinherit all the weaker children. The
magnificent constituency of mediocrities of which the world is made
up,--the people without biographies, whose lives have made a clear
solution in the fluid menstruum of time, instead of being precipitated in
the opaque sediment of history--

But this is a narrative, and not a disquisition.

CHAPTER XX.

FROM WITHOUT AND FROM WITHIN.

There were not wanting people who accused Dudley VENNER of weakness and
bad judgment in his treatment of his daughter. Some were of opinion that
the great mistak