What estranged was my continued fear of him, which now yields easily to analysis and dispersal, but was in those days regarded by me merely as an instinct, as natural and as incontrovertible as hunger or thirst. I understood neither him nor any part of him. I did not grasp the fact that the root in him as regards his children was his love for them, and that it was his love and nothing else that, at bottom, was accountable for his quickness in putting his finger on a fault and his sternness in rebuke. It was out of his love that he regarded himself so strictly as responsible for our mental and moral education, and what I thought his readiness to blame was only the watchfulness of it. For instance, if, as I so well specifically remember, I appeared with an umbrella huddled up anyhow in its confining elastic, he saw in that a tendency towards slovenliness, and he made, in the fervency of his wish that I should not grow up to be of slovenly habit, no allowance for the natural frailty of tender years. Trivial carelessness and unpunctuality in the same way were pounced upon with a severity that altogether over-brimmed the cup of the occasion; he saw in them (and his love hastened to correct) instances of a dangerous tendency. In consequence he brought great and formidable guns to bear on small faults, which could just as efficiently have been visited with a light instead of a heavy hand. Sometimes, too, he was utterly wrong in his interpretation of our motives, and this gave us a sense of injustice; etchingly recorded on my memory, for instance, is a Sunday afternoon walk when Maggie and I pranced and ran ahead, from the mere exuberance, as far as I can judge, produced by a heavy meal and a fine day. But my father put the gloomiest interpretation on our antics, telling us that we were behaving thus in order to excite the admiration of passers-by at our agility. “You are saying to yourselves, ‘I am Hercules, I am Diana,’” he witheringly observed; whereas, nothing was farther from our thoughts. But it was unthinkable to argue the point, to assure him that no similitude of that kind had ever suggested itself. The only course was to walk soberly and sedately instead of running. And since the lives of young children, especially if they are at all vividly inclined, are a chessboard of small faults, this fear of the rebuke, in the absence of comprehension of its root-cause, became a constant anxiety to us, making us mere smooth-faced, blue-eyed dolls in his presence, with set fixed movements and expressions; and when released from it, we scampered off as if from an examination under a magnifying-glass.