“I love to represent the dear friendly man, with brown study-coat and socks hanging down, as he entered our mother’s chamber the first thing in the morning to greet her. The hound springs on before him, and the children hang about him, and seek, when he leaves the room, to thrust their little feet into the slippers behind, when he raises his feet a little, so as to hang on him more securely. One springs before, (at that time my blessed brother lived,) the other two hang on his coat-skirts until he reaches his own chamber-door; where all leave him, for only the dog must enter there. “When we were very small, we lived in a two-story house; my father worked above, in the attic. We crept on our hands and feet over the stairs, and hammered on the door till the father himself arose and opened it, and after our noisy ingress, closed it again--then he took from an old chest a trumpet and a fife, with which we made noisy music while he continued writing. We ventured in again many times in the day to play with a squirrel that he had at that time, and that in the evening he took out with him in his pocket, and always made one of the family circle. “He had, usually, animals that he tamed, about him. Sometimes a mouse; then a great, white, cross spider, that he kept in a paper box, with a glass top. There was a little door beneath, by which he could feed his prisoner with dead flies. In the autumn he collected the winter food for his little tree frog and his tame spider. “The father was good to every thing: he could not bear to witness the least pain, not even in the lowest animals. Thus, he never went out without opening the cage of his canary birds, to indemnify the poor animals, who would be melancholy in his absence. He took at one time the most sedulous care of a dog, who came in one evening after the loss of the poor dead _Alert_, as he knew in the morning he should exchange him for another, and he would have no opportunity to feed him again. You will smile at the connexion, but he did the same for a departing servant maid: providing every thing for her convenience the day before, and delighting the poor girl in the most unusual degree. “The children were permitted all sorts of practical jokes towards him. ‘Father, dance once;’ then he would make some leaps; or he must speak French, in which he placed wonderful value on the nasal sound, which no one made as well as he. It sounded, indeed, curiously and made my mother laugh.