“God _will_ bless him,” said dear Papa impressively, “God will bless _all_ my children _and_ my posterity,”—as if he had been Abraham or God’s Privy Councillor, as indeed he probably thought he was. Even dear Mamma was quelled for a time. “A little che-ild shall lead them,” she quoted venomously; and George Augustus wrote another Non-Conformist tract on loving and united families, taking these holy and inspiring words as his text. * * * * * The first four years of George’s life passed in a welter of squabbling, incompetence and poverty, of which he was quite unconscious, though what harm was done to his subconscious would take a better psychologist than I to determine. I imagine that the combined influence of dear Papa, dear Mamma, Ma and Pa Hartly, George Augustus and Isabel started him off on the race of life with a pretty heavy handicap weight. I should say that George was always an outsider in the Tatersall’s Ring of Life—about 100 to 7 against. However, one can but stick to the events as closely as possible, and leave the reader to form conclusions and lay his own odds. Before George was six months old the rows had begun again in the Sheffield house, and this time more virulently and fiercely than ever. Dear Mamma felt she was fighting for her authority and John Wesley against the intruder. Isabel was fighting for herself and her child and—though she didn’t know it—any vestige of genuine humanity there might have been in George Augustus.