ve riches enter hardly into the kingdom of Heaven. By Jove,
they do; they are like Struldbrugs; they live and live and live and are
happy for many a long year after they would have entered into the kingdom
of Heaven if they had been poor. I want to live long and to raise my
children, if I see they would be happier for the raising; that is what I
want, and it is not what I am doing now that will help me. Being a
gentleman is a luxury which I cannot afford, therefore I do not want it.
Let me go back to my shop again, and do things for people which they want
done and will pay me for doing for them. They know what they want and
what is good for them better than I can tell them."

It was hard to deny the soundness of this, and if he had been dependent
only on the 300 pounds a year which he was getting from me I should have
advised him to open his shop again next morning. As it was, I temporised
and raised obstacles, and quieted him from time to time as best I could.

Of course he read Mr Darwin's books as fast as they came out and adopted
evolution as an article of faith. "It seems to me," he said once, "that
I am like one of those caterpillars which, if they have been interrupted
in making their hammock, must begin again from the beginning. So long as
I went back a long way down in the social scale I got on all right, and
should have made money but for Ellen; when I try to take up the work at a
higher stage I fail completely." I do not know whether the analogy holds
good or not, but I am sure Ernest's instinct was right in telling him
that after a heavy fall he had better begin life again at a very low
stage, and as I have just said, I would have let him go back to his shop
if I had not known what I did.

As the time fixed upon by his aunt drew nearer I prepared him more and
more for what was coming, and at last, on his twenty-eighth birthday, I
was able to tell him all and to show him the letter signed by his aunt
upon her death-bed to the effect that I was to hold the money in trust
for him. His birthday happened that year (1863) to be on a Sunday, but
on the following day I transferred his shares into his own name, and
presented him with the account books which he had been keeping for the
last year and a half.

In spite of all that I had done to prepare him, it was a long while
before I could get him actually to believe that the money was his own. He
did not say much--no more did I, for I am not sure that I d