'Thank you for saying so much. But I doubt whether my parents would ever have believed that I was not the blackest of black sheep. They were hard and intolerant to me from the first, and I have no pleasurable recollections of even my earliest days. I do not know if it was the same when you were first introduced into it as it is in my remembrance, but the home in which I was born and reared was ruled by cold and formal laws, and by a cold and formal master. How it came about is a mystery I have never tried to solve, but it is a plain fact that I was not a favourite with my parents. My brother--your husband--was; he was much younger than I, but I saw it clearly. His nature was a more pliable one than mine; he could be easily led, not because he was weak, but because he was sympathetic and amiable. I was neither. Perhaps I imbibed some drops of gall with my mother's milk; but I don't pretend to account for my cross grain. My parents might have loved me after their fashion, but their mode of showing their love deprived it of all tenderness. It is a blessing to a man to be able to think of his mother with affection and veneration when she has passed away from him. Such a feeling, and the roads he must have trodden to acquire it, are a counterfoil to much that may be bad in his own nature; but this feeling is not mine. My mother was a weak-minded woman, entirely dominated by the strong mind of her husband. She had no will of her own; she followed the current of his likes and dislikes, of his opinions, of his commands, without question and without inquiry, as a spaniel follows its master. Many persons would see a kind of virtue in this submission; I do not. My father was dogmatic and stern; I could have forgiven him that, if he had been honest-minded. But he was a hypocrite, and I knew it, and he knew that I knew it. With great appearance of candour, he, when conversing with acquaintances in the presence of my mother and myself, would give expression to sentiments in which he did not believe; then, when we were alone, he would take off his mask of dissimulation, and go over the ground again according to his own conviction, and justify his deceit. If my mother ever thought of these things, she must have been bewildered; I did think of him, and I was indignant. Most especially was he a hypocrite in religious matters; his prayers and his practice were utterly at variance. I could not respect one who professed to believe that charity was a good thing, and who declined to practise it. He was intolerant to a degree; his was the only right way--all others were wrong. It was my evil fortune--I suppose I must call it so--to possess a mind which led me to sift things for myself; I _could_ not accept established doctrines, and this, in my father's eyes, was not only a great presumption but a great crime. It is not necessary for me to state how, little by little, I became estranged from such parental affection as might have been bestowed upon me had I