y father as a flower he had the sole keeping of: and his joy in her
wild mirth, his watching her childish moods of sadness, as if a shadow
came over her young heaven, were themselves something to watch. Her
delicate life made no struggle with disease; it as it were declined to
stay on such conditions. She therefore sunk at once and without much
pain, her soul quick and unclouded, and her little forefinger playing to
the last with my father's silvery curls, her eyes trying in vain to
brighten his:--

"Thou wert a dew-drop which the morn brings forth,
Not fitted to be trailed along the soiling earth;
But at the touch of wrong, without a strife,
Slips in a moment out of life."

His distress, his anguish at this stroke, was not only intense, it was
in its essence permanent; he went mourning and looking for her all his
days; but after she was dead, that resolved will compacted him in an
instant. It was on a Sabbath morning she died, and he was all day at
church, not many yards from where lay her little corpse alone in the
house. His colleague preached in the forenoon, and in the afternoon he
took his turn, saying before beginning his discourse:--"It has pleased
the Father of Lights to darken one of the lights of my dwelling--had the
child lived I would have remained with her, but now I have thought it
right to arise and come into the house of the Lord and worship." Such
violence to one part of his nature by that in it which was supreme,
injured him: it was like pulling up on the instant an express train; the
whole inner organization is minutely, though it may be invisibly hurt;
its molecular constitution damaged by the cruel stress and strain. Such
things are not right; they are a cruelty and injustice and injury from
the soul to the body, its faithful slave, and they bring down, as in his
case they too truly did, their own certain and specific retribution. A
man who did not feel keenly might have preached; a man whose whole
nature was torn, shattered, and astonished as his was, had in a high
sense _no right_ so to use himself; and when too late he opened his eyes
to this. It was part of our old Scottish severe unsparing
character--calm to coldness outside, burning to fierceness, tender to
agony within.

I was saying how much my father enjoyed women's company. He liked to
look on them, and watch them, listening[21] to their keen, unconnected,
and unreasoning, but not unreasonable talk. Men's argument, or rather
a