"I have it all before me even now," he said, at length, in a low and tremulous tone, "that dark and horrible scene, and its terrible consequences. There are some things which brand themselves upon the mind even of childhood with marks never to be effaced; and, though long years and busy scenes, passions, desires, hopes, joys, acts, feelings, have thronged so thickly into the intervening space that one would think they raised up a cloud between the present and the past which no eye could penetrate--yet there it is, that one terrible hour, as vivid and distinct as when it burst upon me like a blaze of lightning. This hand, young man, took my elder brother's life--not willingly, mark me--not with forethought, nor under the rash impulse of any sudden passion. We were boys together, and loved each other well. I envied him not his elder birth, God knows; I hardly even knew or felt its advantages. It was all in sport; I knew not that the gun was charged. He had presented it at me himself the moment before. God only knows how it was that I was not the victim, and that _he_ was not left to mourn _me_. Think then of my horror when the musquetoon went off, and my brother fell at my feet a bleeding corpse! That was the first sickening taste of the bitterness with which my cup was to be filled; but, when, instead of comfort in my agony, and support under the dreadful weight cast upon me, I found the awful misfortune imputed to me as a crime, when, in spite of its being shown and proved, by those who witnessed it, that all were accidental, and my horror and grief was apparent to all eyes, I was cast out from the bosom of my family like an exile, banished to a distance, and treated like a criminal who has only escaped condign punishment by some quirk of law, and who lives with the shame and the reproach and the stigma clinging to him for ever--to describe my sensations then, is impossible. At first, it was all a chaos of sorrow; but gradually the sense of injustice raised up a spirit of resistance, hard, dogged, malevolent, but still serviceable, for it enabled me to bear up. And then, for my blessing and my safety, I found two friends, who gave a better direction to my thoughts--who raised up hope again in my bosom, and softened even the memory of the past. The first was the minister under whose tuition I was placed; a wise and good man, who moved, in his humble sphere, untainted by the vices or the follies of the day. The other was your noble father; a lad some years older than myself, who was pursuing his studies under the same tutor. Oh, how sweetly those days come back on memory, when first my heart opened to his kindness, and when, loaded with anguish, such as is rarely known but in manhood, I told him all my thoughts, and wept upon his bosom like a child! How sweetly, too, come back his counsels and exhortations! how gently, how kindly he soothed my angry feelings! how wisely he taught me to rely on higher