With all his hardness, he had one object of affection, to which all that was gentle in his nature was bent. That object wits the boy by whom he now stood, and for whom he had a great--an almost parental regard. Perhaps it was that he thought the lad not very well treated; and, as such had been his own case, there was sympathy in the matter. But besides, he had been intrusted with his education from a very early period, had taken a pleasure in the task, had found his scholar apt, willing, and affectionate, with a sufficient touch of his own character in the boy to make the sympathy strong, and yet sufficient diversity to interest and to excite. The old man was tenderer toward him than toward any other being upon earth; and he sometimes feared that his early injunctions to study and perseverance were somewhat too strictly followed--even to the detriment of health. He often looked with some anxiety at the increasing paleness of the cheek, at the too vivid gleam of the eye, at the eager nervous quivering of the lip, and said within himself, "This is overdone." He did not like to check, after he had encouraged--to draw the rein where he had been using the spur. There is something of vanity in us all, and the sternest is not without that share which makes man shrink from the imputation of error, even when made by his own heart. He did not choose to think that the lad had needed no urging forward and yet he would fain have had him relax a little more, and strove at times to make him do so. But the impulse had been given: it had carried the youth over the difficulties and obstacles in the way to knowledge, and now he went on to acquire it, with an eagerness, a thirst, that had something fearful in it. A bent, too, had been given to his mind--nay, to his character, partly by the stern uncompromising character of him to whom his education had been solely intrusted, partly by his own peculiar situation, and partly by the subjects on which his reading had chiefly turned. The stern old Roman of the early republic; the deeds of heroic virtue--as virtue was understood by the Romans; the sacrifice of all tender affections, all the sensibilities of our nature to the rigid thought of what is right; the remorseless disregard of feelings implanted by God, when opposed to the notion of duties of man's creation, excited his wonder and his admiration, and would have hardened and perverted his heart, had not that heart been naturally full of kindlier affections. As it was, there often existed a struggle--a sort of hypothetical struggle--in his bosom, between the mind and the heart. He asked himself sometimes, if he could sacrifice any of those he knew and loved--his father, his mother, his brother, to the good of his country, to some grave duty; and he felt pained and roused to resistance of his own affections when he perceived what a pang it would cost him.