en cords, my mother's
own library, saying more to the heart than all the cold wise poets whose
souls my father invoked in his grand Heraclea. The Bible over which,
with eyes yet untaught to read, I had hung in vague awe and love as it
lay open on my mother's lap, while her sweet voice, then only serious,
was made the oracle of its truths. And my first lesson-books were there,
all hoarded. And bound in blue and gold, but elaborately papered up,
Cowper's Poems,--a gift from my father in the days of courtship: sacred
treasure; which not even I had the privilege to touch, and which my
mother took out only in the great crosses and trials of conjugal life,
whenever some words less kind than usual had dropped unawares from her
scholar's absent lips. Ah! all these poor household gods, all seemed
to look on me with mild anger; and from all came a voice to my soul,
"Cruel, dost thou forsake us?" And amongst them sat my mother, desolate
as Rachel, and weeping silently.

"Mother! mother!" I cried, falling on her neck, "forgive me,--it is
past; I cannot leave you!"

CHAPTER III.

"No, no! it is for your good,--Austin says so. Go,--it is but the first
shock."

Then to my mother I opened the sluices of that deep I had concealed from
scholar and soldier. To her I poured all the wild, restless thoughts
which wandered through the ruins of love destroyed; to her I confessed
what to myself I had scarcely before avowed. And when the picture of
that, the darker, side of my mind was shown, it was with a prouder face
and less broken voice that I spoke of the manlier hopes and nobler aims
that gleamed across the wrecks and the desert and showed me my escape.

"Did you not once say, mother, that you had felt it like a remorse
that my father's genius passed so noiselessly away,--half accusing the
happiness you gave him for the death of his ambition in the content
of his mind? Did you not feel a new object in life when the ambition
revived at last, and you thought you heard the applause of the world
murmuring round your scholar's cell? Did you not share in the day dreams
your brother conjured up, and exclaim, 'If my brother could be the means
of raising him in the world!' And when you thought we had found the way
to fame and fortune, did you not sob out from your full heart, 'And it
is my brother who will pay back to his son all--all he gave up for me'?"

"I cannot bear this, Sisty! Cease, cease!"

"No; for do you not yet understand