etch, when
at once I awoke, and there was I alone, and the night storm was howling
amidst the branches of the pines which surround my lonely dwelling:
"Listen to the moaning of the pine, at whose root thy hut is fastened,"--a
saying that, of wild Finland, in which there is wisdom; I listened and
thought of life and death. . . . Of all human beings that I have ever
known, that elder brother was the most frank and generous, ay, and the
quickest and readiest, and the best adapted to do a great thing needful
at the critical time, when the delay of a moment would be fatal. I have
known him dash from a steep bank into a stream in his full dress, and
pull out a man who was drowning; yet there were twenty others bathing in
the water, who might have saved him by putting out a hand, without
inconvenience to themselves, which, however, they did not do, but stared
with stupid surprise at the drowning one's struggles. Yes, whilst some
shouted from the bank to those in the water to save the drowning one, and
those in the water did nothing, my brother neither shouted nor stood
still, but dashed from the bank and did the one thing needful, which,
under such circumstances, not one man in a million would have done. Now,
who can wonder that a brave old man should love a son like this, and
prefer him to any other?

"My boy, my own boy, you are the very image of myself, the day I took off
my coat in the park to fight Big Ben," said my father, on meeting his son
wet and dripping, immediately after his bold feat. And who cannot excuse
the honest pride of the old man--the stout old man?

Ay, old man, that son was worthy of thee, and thou wast worthy of such a
son; a noble specimen wast thou of those strong single-minded Englishmen,
who, without making a parade either of religion or loyalty, feared God
and honoured their king, and were not particularly friendly to the
French, whose vaunting polls they occasionally broke, as at Minden and at
Malplaquet, to the confusion vast of the eternal foes of the English
land. I, who was so little like thee that thou understoodst me not, and
in whom with justice thou didst feel so little pride, had yet perception
enough to see all thy worth, and to feel it an honour to be able to call
myself thy son; and if at some no distant time, when the foreign enemy
ventures to insult our shore, I be permitted to break some vaunting poll,
it will be a triumph to me to think that, if thou hadst lived, thou
wouldst