What should I not have lost had I not done it!

As usual my cards turned up trumps! but they began to do so in a way
that caused me much, and my wife more, grief at the time. Within two
years after my marriage, poor, dear, good, loving Harriet caught
small-pox and died! She was much more largely endowed than her
half-sister, to whom she bequeathed all she had.

She had a brother, as I have said above. But he had altogether
alienated himself from his family by becoming a Roman Catholic priest
There was no open quarrel. I met him frequently in after years at
Garrow's table at Torquay, and remember his bitter complaints that he
was tempted by the appearance of things at table which he ought not to
eat. It would have been of no use to give or bequeath money to
him, for it would have gone immediately to Romanist ecclesiastical
purposes. He had nearly stripped himself of his own considerable
means, reserving to himself only the bare competence on which a
Catholic priest might live. He was altogether a very queer fish!
I remember his coming to me once in tearful but very angry mood,
because, as he said, I had guilefully spread snares for his soul! I
had not the smallest comprehension of his meaning till I discovered
that his woe and wrath were occasioned by my having sent him as a
present Berington's _Middle Ages_. I had fancied that his course of
studies and line of thought would have made the book interesting to
him, utterly ignorant or oblivious of the fact that it laboured under
the disqualification of appearing in the _Index_.

I take it I knew little about the _Index_ in those days. In after
years, when three or four of my own books had been placed in its
columns, I was better informed. I remember a very elegant lady who
having overheard my present wife mention the fact that a recently
published book of mine had been placed in the _Index_, asked her, with
the intention of being extremely polite and complimentary, whether
_her_ (my wife's) books had been put in the _Index_. And when the
latter modestly replied that she had not written anything that could
merit such a distinction, her interlocutor, patting her on the
shoulder with a kindly and patronising air, said "Oh! my dear, I am
_sure_ they will be placed there. They certainly ought to be!"

Mrs. Garrow, my wife's mother, was not, I think, an amiable woman. She
must have been between seventy and eighty when I first knew her; but
she was still vigorous, and had sti