Is it strange that I should remember such a scene? This was my first consciousness of life. I remember nothing previous to that night, and what I saw and heard then was burned into my very being to remain a part of it as long as I continue to be. She was my mother, my own, my darling mama. I am now an old man and the sands in my hour-glass are nearly run out. I have had trials enough to have hardened all my feelings into iron, yet as I think of my dear little mama, in her agony and despair on that memorable night, great tears run down my furrowed cheeks. I cannot help their coming, and I would not if I could. Blessed tears! that relieve us in our sorrows and moisten our hearts with tenderness. It was a strange scene to me. I was frightened into silence and could not stir, and dared not cry. I could understand that my mama was in great trouble, though I knew not why it was, nothing of the cause of it. I sat in a corner partly concealed by a cloth hung on a rope that was stretched across the room. I now see every little thing as it was then, my mother’s eyes, the big tear drops on her cheeks are now in my sight, after all these years, just as I saw them then. I hear my mama’s voice, its wailing tones of entreaty, of despair. I see her body quivering in her agony as she was clinging to the feet of the sahib, just as vividly as if she was before me now. As I learned afterward, he used to come late at night, so that I was asleep in a little side room when he came. At the front of the court was a large gate, but I was told the sahib never came in by that way. At the back end of the court there was a little narrow door, through which the rubbish and sweepings were carried and thrown, into a gully that wound its way to the old canal beyond the city. It was by the gully where the rubbish lay and through the door by which the sweepings went out that the sahib came in, never by daylight, but always near dead of night. Shall I now express my opinion of that very brave _Christian English gentleman_? coming up through that stinking gully, through that little back door at the hour of midnight? A man who would do that would not only destroy the woman he had called his wife, make outcasts of his own children, but would barter his own soul and betray his God to gratify his lust. But I must not let my feelings overcome me. Yet I cannot help saying that often since then, when I have thought of that night scene, I have felt like tearing a passion to tatters, aye more than that, to be really truthful, to murder somebody; _even that man_, my own father, for the infamous wrong done my darling mother.