It must be added, however, that these firm resolves were but seldom taken, and then only upon great occasions, when we were sure, sooner or later, to discover that Emily was right, for they were the offspring of firmness and not obstinacy, and I have often seen her execute her resolve with tears, so great was the struggle between her inclination and her sense of right. Soon after my arrival in London, a tutor was found for me, and brought with him to our family a strong recommendation. Yet, although he was a learned and clever man, I am not sure that he was exactly the person best calculated to bring up a youth of a fiery temperament and an erratic imagination like myself. He had been long in Germany, it seems, where his mind had become strongly tinged with a sort of mysticism, a small portion of which soon communicated itself to me, and which only served to set my fancy wandering more wildly still. But that was not alone the evil which his residence in foreign lands had wrought in him. His moral principles had become strangely twisted, and though he advocated most eloquently the strictest adherence to truth, and was most rigorous and exact in his notions of justice and equity, yet, upon many other points, his notions were sadly relaxed. He was a tall uncouth man, too; by no means thin, but with no breadth of bone, and only gifted with a considerable quantity of muscle and fat, covering a frame originally long and narrow. Nor were his manners peculiarly pleasant, though they were by no means harsh or rude, but he was extremely fond of a joke, and knew no limit in pursuing it: often too, before the joke was apparent to other people, his fancy, tickled by some internal movement of his own mind, would set him off into long fits of laughter, during which his eyes would stream and his shoulders shake as if he were actually in convulsions.