During our journey, Mr Osborne had seldom talked to us, and far more seldom in speech sympathetic. If by chance I came out with anything I thought or felt, even if he did not disapprove altogether, he would yet first lay hold of something to which he could object, coming round only by degrees, and with differences, to express consent. Evidently with him objection was the first step in instruction. It was better in his eyes to say you were wrong than to say you were right, even if you should be much more right than wrong. He had not the smallest idea of siding with the truth in you, of digging about it and watering it until it grew a great tree in which all your thought-birds might nestle and sing their songs; but he must be ever against the error--forgetting that the only antagonist of the false is the true. ‘What,’ I used to think in after-years, ‘is the use of battering the walls to get at the error, when the kindly truth is holding the postern open for you to enter, and pitch it out of window.’ The evening before we parted, he gave us a solemn admonishment on the danger of being led astray by what men called the beauties of Nature--for the heart was so desperately wicked that, even of the things God had made _to show his power_, it would make snares for our destruction. I will not go on with his homily, out of respect for the man; for there was much earnestness in him, and it would utterly shame me if I were supposed to hold that up to the contempt which the forms it took must bring upon it. Besides, he made such a free use of the most sacred of names, that I shrink from representing his utterance. A good man I do not doubt he was; but he did the hard parts of his duty to the neglect of the genial parts, and therefore was not a man to help others to be good. His own son revived the moment he took his leave of us--began to open up as the little red flower called the Shepherd’s Hour-Glass opens when the cloud withdraws. It is a terrible thing when the father is the cloud, and not the sun, of his child’s life. If Charley had been like the greater number of boys I have known, all this would only have hardened his mental and moral skin by the natural process of accommodation. But his skin would not harden, and the evil wrought the deeper. From his father he had inherited a conscience of abnormal sensibility; but he could not inherit the religious dogmas by means of which his father had partly deadened, partly distorted his; and constant pressure and irritation had already generated a great soreness of surface.