You will have a son some day yourself, I suppose, and if you do, I can wish you no greater satisfaction than to be able to say that he has reached manhood without having given you a serious anxiety, and that you can look forward with entire confidence to his playing the man in the battle of life. I have tried to make you feel your responsibilities and act independently as early as possible--but, once for all, remember that I am not only your father but your nearest friend, ready to help you in all things reasonable, and perhaps in a few unreasonable. [This domestic happiness which struck others so forcibly was one of the vital realities of his existence. Without it his quick spirit and nervous temperament could never have endured the long and often embittered struggle--not merely with equanimity, but with a constant growth of sympathy for earnest humanity, which, in early days obscured from view by the turmoil of strife, at length became apparent to all as the tide of battle subsided. None realised more than himself what the sustaining help and comradeship of married life had wrought for him, alike in making his life worth living and in making his life's work possible. Here he found the pivot of his happiness and his strength; here he recognised to the full the care that took upon itself all possible burdens and left his mind free for his greater work. He had always a great tenderness for children. "One of my earliest recollections of him," writes Jeffery Parker, "is in connection with a letter he wrote to my father, on the occasion of the death, in infancy, of one of my brothers. 'Why,' he wrote, 'did you not tell us before that the child was named after me, that we might have made his short life happier by a toy or two.' I never saw a man more crushed than he was during the dangerous illness of one of his daughters, and he told me that, having then to make an after-dinner speech, he broke down for the first time in his life, and for one painful moment forgot where he was and what he had to say. I can truly say that I never knew a man whose way of speaking of his family, or whose manner in his own home, was fuller of a noble, loving, and withal playful courtesy." After he had retired to Eastbourne, his grandchildren reaped the benefit of his greater leisure. In his age his love of children brimmed over with undiminished force, unimpeded by circumstances. He would make endless fun with them, until one little mite, on her first visit, with whom her grandfather was trying to ingratiate himself with a vast deal of nonsense, exclaimed: "Well, you are the curioustest old man I ever seen."