metimes
took part in these strange conversations, and was mightily puffed
up by compliments paid, in whispers, to my infant piety. But my
Mother very properly discouraged this, as tending in me to
spiritual pride.

If my parents, in their desire to separate themselves from the
world, had regretted that through their happiness they seemed to
have forfeited the Christian privilege of affliction, they could
not continue to complain of any absence of temporal adversity.
Everything seemed to combine, in the course of this fatal year
1856, to harass and alarm them. Just at the moment when illness
created a special drain upon their resources, their slender
income, instead of being increased, was seriously diminished.
There is little sympathy felt in this world of rhetoric for the
silent sufferings of the genteel poor, yet there is no class that
deserves a more charitable commiseration.

At the best of times, the money which my parents had to spend was
an exiguous and an inelastic sum. Strictly economical, proud--in
an old-fashioned mode now quite out of fashion--to conceal the
fact of their poverty, painfully scrupulous to avoid giving
inconvenience to shop-people, tradesmen or servants, their whole
financial career had to be carried on with the adroitness of a
campaign through a hostile country. But now, at the moment when
fresh pressing claims were made on their resources, my Mother's
small capital suddenly disappeared. It had been placed, on bad
advice (they were as children in such matters), in a Cornish
mine, the grotesque name of which, Wheal Maria, became familiar
to my ears. One day the river Tamar, in a playful mood, broke
into Wheal Maria, and not a penny more was ever lifted from that
unfortunate enterprise. About the same time, a small annuity
which my Mother had inherited also ceased to be paid.

On my Father's books and lectures, therefore, the whole weight
now rested, and that at a moment when he was depressed and
unnerved by anxiety. It was contrary to his principles to borrow
money, so that it became necessary to pay doctor's and chemist's
bills punctually, and yet to carry on the little household with
the very small margin. Each artifice of economy was now exercised
to enable this to be done without falling into debt, and every
branch of expenditure was cut down, clothes, books, the little
garden which was my Father's pride, all felt the pressure of new
poverty. Even our food, which had always been simp