As an example of my hatred, not so much of the man as of his assumption of my father’s place: he brought his door-plate and his lamp from his house, and when I saw his plate upon the door that my father used to go in and out of I ran to a carpenter who lived a few streets off, brought him back with his tools, and ordered him to remove the plate, which I threw into the kitchen sink for the cook to find and report to her master. Well, at the end of ten months, my mother died in childbed. The infant lived. It was a girl. My mother died; and when I went to her bedside and viewed her dead face, sweet in its everlasting sleep, for the look and wear of ten or fifteen years seemed to have been brushed off her countenance by the hand of death, I thought to myself: if she has gone to meet father, how will she excuse herself for her disloyalty? And then the little new-born babe that was in the next room began to cry, and I came away from that death-bed with tearless eyes and sat in my bedroom, thinking without weeping. I have spoken of my uncle, William Johnstone, a lawyer, who lived in the neighbourhood of the Tower, and whose office was in his own dwelling-house. He, like my father, had but one child, Will Johnstone, that little fellow who was playing with me when my father died. Mr. Johnstone’s was a very comfortable house; it afterward passed into the hands of a chart-seller. His clients were nearly wholly composed of sea-going people. He was said to be very learned in maritime law; he was much consulted by masters and mates with grievances, and at his house, as at my father’s formerly, you’d meet few people who did not follow the ocean or did not do business with seafarers. Mrs. Johnstone was three or four years older than her husband. She was a plain, homely, thoroughly good-hearted woman, incapable of an ill-natured thought; one of those few people who are content to be as God made them. During my mother’s brief married life with her second husband I was constantly with my aunt, and I believe I should have lived with her wholly but for my determination that my stepfather, the doctor, should not flatter himself he had sickened me out of my own home. Will was at this time at the Bluecoat School, laying in a stock of Latin and Greek for the fishes; for the lad was resolved to go to sea. His father, indeed, wished him to adopt that calling, and would say: ‘What is the good of a cargo of learning the whole of which will be thrown up overboard the first dirty night down Channel?’