When we are aware that those to whom we owe existence have devoted long years, during our infancy and youth, to protect, to nourish, and to guide us; when they have thought of us rather than themselves, and sacrificed pleasure and amusement, and tastes and feelings, for our benefit; when they have spent the weary hours of watchfulness over the bed of infancy and of sickness; when they have rejoiced in our joys and mourned for our sorrows; when they have made efforts for us that they would not have made for themselves, and even corrected us with more pain to themselves than to us, for our benefit; when they have felt it a pang, and yet a duty, to deny us what we sought; and when they have given up, in short, time, thought, pleasure, exertion, energy, hope, comfort, selfishness, for our after welfare; when they have done all this, and we know it, there is nothing on earth can equal, or should equal, the love and gratitude of a child for his parents. But when, on the other hand, we owe them nothing but existence, a gift given selfishly, to be selfishly employed; when we have been to them but as objects of pleasure or dominion to themselves, the matter is very different, and the love and gratitude that we show them must have its source in that love and gratitude we owe to the better Father, whose will placed them in such relationship to us. Charles Tyrrell, then, could not love his father; and, had not his mother been living, it is probable that, devoting himself entirely to study, he would not even have visited his paternal mansion during the vacations; but when he thought of her, and how much she needed comfort; of her fond and deep affection for him, and her loneliness in his absence, he determined to go back, although he feared the violence of his father's disposition, and even feared the violence of his own. Such was the state of his mind towards the commencement of his first vacation; and pursuing his plan of economy, he came up to London by the Oxford stage, and thence proceeded by the Old Blue, night coach, towards his own dwelling, though that was a period at which young men were not in the custom either of driving the coaches that carried them, or, indeed, of travelling by such conveyances at all, when their circumstances enabled them to afford another. The Old Blue coach contained in the inside the number of six passengers, and slow and heavy was its progress along roads which had not yet submitted to the petrifying power of Mr. M'Adam. The personage, then, who was seated in the middle, was under the unpleasant necessity either of watching through the long progress of a tedious night in the strait-waistcoat of a close-packed stage, or to choose the shoulder of one of his fellow-travellers for a pillow, which was hard or soft, as the case might be.