h we call Life.
I showed you as you were,--still thoughtful for us, interested in
our interests, smiling on us, that we might not guess that you wept
in secret! Oh, my son, my son, do not think that in those times I
did not feel and pray for you! And while he was melted by my own
emotion, I turned from your love to your ambition. I made him see
that you too had known the restlessness which belongs to young,
ardent natures; that you too had had your dreams of fortune and
aspirations for success. But I painted that ambition in its true
colors: it was not the desire of a selfish intellect to be in
yourself a somebody, a something, raised a step or two in the
social ladder, for the pleasure of looking down on those at the
foot, but the warmer yearning of a generous heart; your ambition
was to repair your father's losses, minister to your father's very
foible in his idle desire of fame, supply to your uncle what he had
lost in his natural heir, link your success to useful objects, your
interests to those of your kind, your reward to the proud and
grateful smiles of those you loved. That was thine ambition, O my
tender Anachronism! And when, as I closed the sketch, I said,
"Pardon me, you know not what delight a father feels when, while
sending a son away from him into the world, he can speak and think
thus of him. But this, you see, is not your kind of ambition. Let
us talk of making money, and driving a coach-and-four through this
villanous world,"--your cousin sank into a profound revery; and
when he woke from it, it was like the waking of the earth after a
night in spring,--the bare trees had put forth buds!

And, some time after, he startled me by a prayer that I would
permit him, with his father's consent, to accompany you to
Australia. The only answer I have given him as yet has been in the
form of a question: "Ask yourself if I ought? I cannot wish
Pisistratus to be other than he is; and unless you agree with him
in all his principles and objects, ought I to incur the risk that
you should give him your knowledge of the world and inoculate him
with your ambition?" he was struck, and had the candor to attempt
no reply.

Now, Pisistratus, the doubt I expressed to him is the doubt I feel.
For, indeed, it is only by home-truths, not refining arguments,
that I can deal with this unscholastic Scythian, who, fresh