nd I am not convinced that Dormant,
coarse and narrow as he was, may not have sincerely believed that
it was better for the money to be used in religious propaganda
than in the pleasures of the world, of which he doubtless formed
a very vague idea. On this affair I meditated much, and it
awakened in my mind, for the first time, a doubt whether our
exclusive system of ethics was an entirely salutary one, if it
could lead the conscience of a believer to tolerate such acts as
these, acts which my Father himself had denounced as
dishonourable and disgraceful.

My stepmother brought with her a little library of such books as
we had not previously seen, but which yet were known to all the
world except us. Prominent among these was a set of the poems of
Walter Scott, and in his unwonted geniality and provisional
spirit of compromise, my Father must do no less than read these
works aloud to my stepmother in the quiet spring evenings. This
was a sort of aftermath of courtship, a tribute of song to his
bride, very sentimental and pretty. She would sit, sedately, at
her workbox, while he, facing her, poured forth the verses at her
like a blackbird. I was not considered in this arrangement, which
was wholly matrimonial, but I was present, and the exercise made
more impression upon me than it did upon either of the principal
agents. My Father read the verse admirably, with a full,--some
people (but not I) might say with a too full--perception of the
metre as well as of the rhythm, rolling out the rhymes, and
glorying in the proper names. He began, and it was a happy
choice, with 'The Lady of the Lake'. It gave me singular pleasure
to hear his large voice do justice to 'Duncrannon' and 'Cambus-
Kenneth', and wake the echoes with 'Rhoderigh Vich Alphine dhu,
ho! ieroe!' I almost gasped with excitement, while a shudder
floated down my backbone, when we came to:

A sharp and shrieking echo gave,
Coir-Uriskin, thy goblin cave!
And the grey pass where birches wave,
On Beala-nam-bo,

a passage which seemed to me to achieve the ideal of sublime
romance. My thoughts were occupied all day long with the
adventures of Fitzjames and the denizens of Ellen's Isle. It
became an obsession, and when I was asked whether I remembered
the name of the cottage where the minister of the Bible
Christians lodged, I answered, dreamily, 'Yes,--Beala-nambo.'

Seeing me so much fascinated, thrown indeed into a temporary
frenzy, by the epic poe