"Never shall I forget the look, the manner, the voice, with which he said to me, 'It is an awful thing for her to continue to live. It is awful for her so to die. But has it ever occurred to you how awful the recovery of her lost reason would be, without the consciousness of the loss of time? She finds the lover of her youth a gray-haired old man, and her infants young men and women. Is it not sad to think of this?'" His mother came to live with him, and his children grew to maturity beneath his roof, one of them the Miss Thackeray now so well known as a novelist. But tenderly as he was attached to them,--and there could have been no fonder father,--he no doubt felt all the sadness of the thought that "The many make the household, But only one the home." In one of the "Roundabouts" he says:-- "I own, for my part, that in reading papers which this hand formerly penned, I often lose sight of the text under my eyes. It is not the words I see, but that past day, that by-gone page of life's history, that tragedy--comedy it may be--which our little home company were enacting, that merry-making which we shared, that funeral which we followed, that bitter, bitter grief which we buried." That he should live much in that vanished past, was but natural; yet it was hard for a man like Thackeray, who had naturally such great capacity for the enjoyment of life. That his home was a pleasant and goodly place, all who have ever visited it bear witness. He made it his refuge from all outer troubles, and practised a genial and kindly hospitality there. It was a long time before he was able to buy a house, though he made a good deal of money from his books, his free-handed generous ways always keeping him back financially; but when he was enabled to buy one, he took great pride and pleasure in it, and decorated it according to his artistic tastes. To make a little more money for his daughters, that they might be independent when he was gone, he began lecturing, and was twice induced to come to America for that purpose, much as he dreaded leaving home, and especially crossing the ocean.