It was this error which, in the present instance, ultimately produced the result that she wished. He one day heard her say, by chance, while stooping over her boy, that it would break her heart to part with him; and a suspicion crossed his mind that she had proposed to send the child to school for the purpose of inducing him to pursue exactly the opposite course. The very thought was, indeed, but little complimentary to his own disposition, and arose from an internal consciousness (the full force of which he would not acknowledge) of the contradictory and mulish character of his own mind. His determination, however, was fixed by a scene of altercation with the boy himself, whom he had punished severely for doing something that his mother had directed him to do, but whom he could induce by no means, neither by anger nor by blows, to acknowledge that he had done wrong in the slightest degree. It was determined, in consequence, that he should go to school, and to school he was accordingly sent; but, unfortunately, not to a school which was at all likely to correct the constitutional errors of his disposition, or to afford to his mind that strong moral tone which might have served to counteract all the evils with which his mind became familiarized at home. As it is not our purpose to trace him through the uninteresting details of a school life, we shall content ourselves with showing what was his natural disposition; and though he is the person destined to act the most prominent part in these pages, we shall in no degree conceal that which was evil in his nature. His first great fault, then, was a part of his inheritance, the violent passion of his father. Even when a child, he would throw himself down in fits of ungovernable anger, and lie writhing on the ground, as if in convulsions, till the fit went off. He had much of the talent, too, of his father; perhaps; indeed, more, and certainly possessed genius of a higher order; for the qualities of his mind received a much greater degree of expansion from being united with superior qualities of the heart. There was, however, a frequent similarity to be observed between the turn and form of his ideas and those of Sir Francis. In his childhood, even, he had been known unconsciously to utter many a keen and cutting phrase, which brought upon the countenance of his father a sarcastic smile, in which was strangely blended an expression of contempt and bitterness with that of approbation and pleasure.