lded a
life-annuity of feuds.

I had at that time an elder brother, in fact, the eldest of us all, and
at least five years senior to myself. He, by original temperament, was a
boy of fiery nature, ten times more active than I was inert, loving the
element of feuds and stormy conflict more (if that were possible) than I
detested it; and these constitutional tendencies had in him been nursed
by the training of a public school. This accident in his life was indeed
the cause of our now meeting as strangers. Singular, indeed, it seems,
but, in fact, had arisen naturally enough, that both this eldest of my
brothers, and my father, should be absolute strangers to me in my
seventh year; so that, in the case of meeting either, I should not have
known him, nor he me. In my father's case, this arose from the accident
of his having lived abroad for a space that, measured against _my_ life,
was a very long one. First, he lived in Portugal, at Lisbon; and at
Cintra; next in Madeira; then in the West Indies; sometimes in Jamaica,
sometimes in St. Kitts, courting the supposed benefit of hot climates in
his complaint of pulmonary consumption; and at last, when all had proved
unavailing, he was coming home to die among his family, in his
thirty-ninth year. My mother had gone to wait his arrival at the port
(Southampton, probably), to which the West India packet should bring
him; and among the deepest recollections which I connect with that
period, is one derived from the night of his arrival at Greenhay. It was
a summer evening of unusual solemnity. The servants, and four of us
children--six then survived--were gathered for hours, on the lawn before
the house, listening for the sound of wheels. Sunset came--nine, ten,
eleven o'clock, and nearly another hour had passed--without a warning
sound; for Greenhay, being so solitary a house, formed a _terminus ad
quem_, beyond which was nothing but a cluster of cottages, composing the
little hamlet of Greenhill; so that any sound of wheels, heard in the
winding lane which then connected us with the Rusholme road, carried
with it, of necessity, a warning summons to prepare for visitors at
Greenhay. No such summons had yet reached us; it was nearly midnight;
and, for the last time, it was determined that we should move in a body
out of the grounds, on the chance of meeting the traveling party, if, at
so late an hour, it could yet be expected to arrive. In fact, to our
general surprise, we met it a