tunate
conviction, that nature had intended him for a humorist, tainted all his
evidence, besides making it wearisome to hear. Again, of such among our
contemporaries as we had approached, the trumpets gave forth an
uncertain sound. According to some it meant larks, revels, emancipation,
and a foretaste of the bliss of manhood. According to others--the
majority, alas!--it was a private and peculiar Hades, that could give
the original institution points and a beating. When Edward was observed
to be swaggering round with a jaunty air and his chest stuck out, I knew
that he was contemplating his future from the one point of view. When,
on the contrary, he was subdued and unaggressive, and sought the society
of his sisters, I recognised that the other aspect was in the ascendant.
'You can always run away, you know,' I used to remark consolingly on
these latter occasions; and Edward would brighten up wonderfully at the
suggestion, while Charlotte melted into tears before her vision of a
brother with blistered feet and an empty belly, passing nights of frost
'neath the lee of windy haystacks.

It was to Edward, of course, that the situation was chiefly productive
of anxiety; and yet the ensuing change in my own circumstances and
position furnished me also with food for grave reflexion. Hitherto I had
acted mostly to orders. Even when I had devised and counselled any
particular devilry, it had been carried out on Edward's approbation,
and--as eldest--at his special risk. Henceforward I began to be anxious
of the bugbear Responsibility, and to realise what a soul-throttling
thing it is. True, my new position would have its compensations. Edward
had been masterful exceedingly, imperious, perhaps a little narrow;
impassioned for hard facts, and with scant sympathy for make-believe. I
should now be free and untrammelled; in the conception and the carrying
out of a scheme, I could accept and reject to better artistic purpose.

It would, moreover, be needless to be a Radical any more. Radical I
never was, really, by nature or by sympathy. The part had been thrust on
me one day, when Edward proposed to foist the House of Lords on our
small republic. The principles of the thing he set forth learnedly and
well, and it all sounded promising enough, till he went on to explain
that, for the present at least, he proposed to be the House of Lords
himself. We others were to be the Commons. There would be promotions, of
course, he added, dep