It would seem that the loss of his beloved wife and the sad recollection of his own motherless unloved boyhood, would have made of John Howard a tender and pitiful, as well as devoted father. Such was not the case, if we may judge from the vehemence with which some of his biographers deny the charges of undue severity to the infant, and forgetfulness and neglect of the growing-up boy, and the silence of others on the same subject. The real truth probably was, so far as we can judge, that the man had nothing in his stiff nature and puritanical education, certainly nothing in his own early life, to make him respond to the uninteresting helplessness of infancy. So we find him doing his duty by the crying infant of a few months, in a manner which would be amusing if it were not pathetic. He takes him from the nurse, lays him across his knees, and sits unmoved and unmovable until the tempest exhausts itself, and the child is silent from exhaustion, when he hands him solemnly back to the nurse, and feels that, by so much at least, has he cast out of the young child the spice of Old Adam, which is the birthright of us all! A few such experiences, we are told, and the child would at once cease its struggles and be silent. One would surely think it would! But the silent, lonely man, bereft of the loving companionship of the gentle wife, who would so differently have soothed and silenced the crying infant, could not long bear the solitude of his broken home, and so began the years of wanderings, which lasted as long as his life, and through which he seems so largely to have lost sight of his young son at his most impressionable age, save to provide for his material wants, and to some extent, also, his education. When with him in later years he appears to have enjoyed his society, or at least the evidences which he gave of implicit, unreasoning obedience, illustrated by his remark, "I believe if I told the boy to put his hand in the fire he would obey me." At four the boy was put into a boarding-school, and the home was broken up. The later glimpses which we get of his career are vague, unsatisfactory, or decidedly bad, until the end came, and "Jack" was incarcerated in a mad-house when but twenty-two, where his unfortunate life went out after twelve years' confinement in a darkness that darkened also the last years of his good, if injudicious, father, with a sorrow beside which all common bereavements should seem like blessings.