This was not however the sole recommendation of Rock Cottage; it stood conveniently between the two villages of Ryde and Leigh, of which my father was the only physician. There was indeed a surgeon at Ryde, but he never passed the threshold of the aristocratic mansions to which Doctor Burns was frequently summoned, and whence he derived the larger portion of his income. That income, never very considerable, proved however sufficient to the few wants of the lonely home where my father, a widower, lived with me, his only child. Of my mother I had no remembrance; my father seldom mentioned her name; but there was a small miniature of her over our parlour mantle-piece, and often in the evening, sitting by our quiet fireside, he would look long and earnestly on the mild and somewhat mournful face before him, then give me a silent caress, as I sat on my stool at his knee, watching him with the ever-attentive look of childhood. I was sickly and delicate, and he indulged me to excess. "Study," he said, "would only injure me, for I was a great deal too clever and precocious for a child;" so he taught me himself the little I knew, and put off from month to month his long contemplated and still cherished project of sending me to some first-rate school. I believe that in his heart he felt loath to part from me, and was secretly glad to find some excuse that should keep me at home. He never left me in the morning without a caress, and often, when he returned late from visiting some distant patient, his first impulse, as well as his first act, was to enter my room and kiss me softly as I slept. I loved him passionately and exclusively, and years have not effaced either his memory or his aspect from my heart. I remember him still, a man of thirty-five or so, tall, pale, and gentlemanly, with wavy hair of a deep golden brown, and dark grey eyes of singular light and beauty. How he seemed to others I know not: to me he was all that was good and great. I felt happy to live thus alone with him; I never wished for the companionship of other children; I asked not to move beyond the limits of our home. Silence, repose, and solitude, things so antipathetic to childhood, were the chief pleasures of mine; partly on account of my bad health, and partly, too, because I had inherited from my father a jealous sort of exclusiveness and reserve, by no means held to be the general characteristic of his countrymen.