Mr Osborne was a very tall, thin, yet square-shouldered man, with a pale face, and large features of delicate form. He looked severe, pure, and irritable. The tone of his voice, although the words were measured and rather stilted, led me to this last conclusion quite as much as the expression of his face; for it was thin and a little acrid. I soon observed that Charley started slightly, as often as his father addressed him; but this might be because his father always did so with more or less of abruptness. At times there was great kindness in his manner, seeming, however, less the outcome of natural tenderness than a sense of duty. His being was evidently a weight upon his son’s, and kept down the natural movements of his spirit. A number of small circumstances only led me to these conclusions; for nothing remarkable occurred to set in any strong light their mutual relation. For his side Charles was always attentive and ready, although with a promptitude that had more in it of the mechanical impulse of habit than of pleased obedience. Mr Osborne spoke kindly to me--I think the more kindly that I was not his son, and he was therefore not so responsible for me. But he looked as if the care of the whole world lay on his shoulders; as if an awful destruction were the most likely thing to happen to every one, and to him were committed the toilsome chance of saving some. Doubtless he would not have trusted his boy so far from home, but that the clergyman to whom he was about to hand him over was an old friend, of the same religious opinions as himself. I could well, but must not, linger over the details of our journey, full to me of most varied pleasure. The constant change, not so rapid as to prevent the mind from reposing a little upon the scenes which presented themselves; the passing vision of countries and peoples, manners and modes of life, so different from our own, did much to arouse and develop my nature. Those flashes of pleasure came upon Charles’s pale face more and more frequently; and ere the close of the first day we had begun to talk with some degree of friendliness. But it became clear to me that with his father ever blocking up our horizon, whether he sat with his broad back in front of us on the coach-box, or paced the deck of a vessel, or perched with us under the hood on the top of a diligence, we should never arrive at any freedom of speech. I sometimes wondered, long after, whether Mr Osborne had begun to discover that he was overlaying and smothering the young life of his boy, and had therefore adopted the plan, so little to have been expected from him, of sending his son to foreign parts to continue his education.