o Shrewsbury. You
knew my dear mother?"

"I did. The best of women."

"The best of women, and the best of mothers. But, if you recollect,
she was a great Low-Church saint."

"Why 'but'? How does that derogate in any wise from her
excellence?"

"Not from her excellence; God forbid! or from the excellence of the
people of her own party, whom she used to have round her, and who
were, some of them, I do believe, as really earnest, and pious, and
charitable, and all that, as human beings could be. But it did take
away very much indeed from her influence on me."

"Surely she did not neglect to teach you."

"It is a strange thing to say, but she rather taught me too much. I
don't deny that it may have been my own fault. I don't blame her,
or any one. But you know what I was at college-no worse than other
men, I dare say; but no better. I had no reason for being better."

"No reason? Surely she gave you reasons."

"There-you have touched the ailing nerve now. The reasons were what
you would call paralogisms. They had no more to do with me than
with those trout."

"You mistake, friend, you mistake, indeed," said I.

"I don't mistake at all about this; that whether or not the reasons
in themselves had to do with me, the way in which she put them made
them practically so much Hebrew. She demanded of me, as the only
grounds on which I was to consider myself safe from hell, certain
fears and hopes which I did not feel, and experiences which I did
not experience; and it was my fault, and a sign of my being in a
wrong state-to use no harder term-that I did not feel them; and yet
it was only God's grace which could make me feel them: and so I
grew up with a dark secret notion that I was a very bad boy; but
that it was God's fault and not mine that I was so."

"You were ripe indeed then," said I sadly, "like hundreds more, for
Professor Windrush's teaching."

"I will come to that presently. But in the meantime-was it my
fault? I was never what you call a devout person. My 'organ of
veneration,' as the phrenologists would say, was never very large.
I was a shrewd dashing boy, enjoying life to the finger-tips, and
enjoying above all, I will say, pleasing my mother in every way,
except in the understanding what she told me-and what I felt I could
not understand. But as I grew older, and watched her, and the men
round her, I began to suspect that religion and effeminacy had a
good deal to do with each othe