wn family, and although I was much younger
at the time it impressed me very strongly. My cousin, who had been
my playmate, was an orphan, and had been intrusted to the care of my
father, who was his guardian. He was always a clever boy, but singularly
sensitive and quick to take offense. Perhaps it was because the little
property his father had left made him partly dependent on my father, and
that I was rich, but he seemed to feel the disparity in our positions.
I was too young to understand it; I think it existed only in his
imagination, for I believe we were treated alike. But I remember that he
was full of vague threats of running away and going to sea, and that
it was part of his weak temperament to terrify me with his extravagant
confidences. I was always frightened when, after one of those scenes,
he would pack his valise or perhaps only tie up a few things in a
handkerchief, as in the advertisement pictures of the runaway slaves,
and declare that we would never lay eyes upon him again. At first I
never saw the ridiculousness of all this,--for I ought to have told you
that he was a rather delicate and timid boy, and quite unfitted for a
rough life or any exposure,--but others did, and one day I laughed at
him and told him he was afraid. I shall never forget the expression of
his face and never forgive myself for it. He went away,--but he returned
the next day! He threatened once to commit suicide, left his clothes on
the bank of the river, and came home in another suit of clothes he had
taken with him. When I was sent abroad to school I lost sight of him;
when I returned he was at college, apparently unchanged. When he
came home for vacation, far from having been subdued by contact with
strangers, it seemed that his unhappy sensitiveness had been only
intensified by the ridicule of his fellows. He had even acquired a
most ridiculous theory about the degrading effects of civilization, and
wanted to go back to a state of barbarism. He said the wilderness was
the only true home of man. My father, instead of bearing with what
I believe was his infirmity, dryly offered him the means to try his
experiment. He started for some place in Texas, saying we would never
hear from him again. A month after he wrote for more money. My father
replied rather impatiently, I suppose,--I never knew exactly what he
wrote. That was some years ago. He had told the truth at last, for we
never heard from him again."

It is to be feared tha