“‘I corresponded regularly with my parents, and they, hearing I was getting into comfortable circumstances, would frequently write me complaints of poverty. To these I responded by remittances of money, and at this time wrote to my father, saying I would allow him £25 a-year, and my mother a similar amount. I visited my father about once in two years, but always took a lodging, and took my meals apart from him, for he was an inveterate smoker and a great beer-drinker, and filled his snuff-box three times weekly. I once made a random calculation that he had wasted £1,500 on stimulants in his life. These reflections prevented me from being more liberal to him. If I had given him £100 a-year, I only know he would have spent more on cigars. He would have bought wine at 6_s._ a bottle, and, perhaps, have increased his consumption of snuff. On getting a legacy of £75 once, £40 went to pay his publican’s bill. One day my father wrote asking me to accommodate my youngest brother and two sisters a few weeks, that they might see the sights of the town and get change of air. I wrote to my father that my wife and I would be very glad to see them, but they must not expect us to make any change in our vegetarian and temperance diet, but at the same time intimating that our style of living was very comfortable. There was an amount of formality between me and my father; he would sometimes call me, in derision, the Joseph of the family, because I went away from the rest and got rich, and I held his ill-success in life to be owing to his improvidence and self-indulgence, and feared he might want me to keep the whole family in idleness; accordingly I was not very much pleased at his proposal to send my sisters and younger brother to me. However, I assented, and they came. My elder sister, Mary Ann, was one of those sulky, vain, indolent natures which neither my wife nor I can sympathise with at all. Public opinion was her god, and Mrs. Grundy her godmother. One day she said to my wife, ‘I wonder you can endure to live as you do with your means; it strikes me as being very poor and miserable. Most people of your means have three meals of meat a-day. Do you never feel tired of the vegetables?’ My wife said no, and that she did not think she could preserve the same health and strength on a meat diet. My wife rose at six, and went to bed at half-past ten, whereas Mary Ann and her sister could not get down to breakfast till ten at home; but when they were with us we took care to have the breakfast cleared away at eight, so that if they came down at ten they had to wait till lunch before they got anything to eat. This strict commissariat roused Mary Ann two hours sooner than usual.