uiet and eventless life, broken only by the one great
sorrow of our father's death. Shortly after this we were sent to a day
school in Bloomsbury. We were neither of us very happy there, but my
brother, who always took kindly to his books, picked up a fair knowledge
of Latin and Greek; he also learned to draw, and to exercise himself a
little in English composition. When I was about fourteen my mother
capitalised a part of her income and started me off to America, where she
had friends who could give me a helping hand; by their kindness I was
enabled, after an absence of twenty years, to return with a handsome
income, but not, alas! before the death of my mother.

Up to the time of my departure my mother continued to read the Bible with
us and explain it. She had become enamoured of those millenarian
opinions which laid hold of so many some twenty-five or thirty years ago.
The Apocalypse was perhaps her favourite book in the Bible, and she was
imbued with a conviction that all the many and varied horrors with which
it teems were upon the eve of their accomplishment. The year eighteen
hundred and forty-eight was to be (as indeed it was) a time of general
bloodshed and confusion, while in eighteen hundred and sixty-six, should
it please God to spare her, her eyes would be gladdened by the visible
descent of the Son of Man with a shout, with the voice of the Archangel,
with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ should rise first; then
she, as one of them that were alive, would be caught up with other saints
into the air, and would possibly receive while rising some distinguishing
token of confidence and approbation which should fall with due
impressiveness upon the surrounding multitude; then would come the
consummation of all things, and she would be ever with the Lord. She
died peaceably in her bed before she could know that a commercial panic
was the nearest approach to the fulfilment of prophecy which the year
eighteen hundred and sixty-six brought forth.

These opinions of my mother's injured her naturally healthy and vigorous
mind by leading her to indulge in all manner of dreamy and fanciful
interpretations of Scripture, which any but the most narrow literalist
would feel at once to be untenable. Thus several times she expressed to
us her conviction that my brother and myself were to be the two witnesses
mentioned in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Revelation, and dilated
upon the gratification she sho