I suppose he really loved me. He often told me, especially when a financial crisis was at its worst, that I was all he had in the world. But he never insured his life, and never made any provision for me after his death. After all, I believe that a father and a girl of sixteen, even if they happen to be gentle-folks, can live in the country on two hundred a year, and even put by a few pounds for insurance. The trouble was that my father could not let his income alone. Every quarter-day brought some new scheme, generally of a wildly speculative and gambling character. And before next quarter-day we were terribly hard up. At first my father confided these schemes to me, but I am quite practical, and I hated them, and told him so. Then he kept his schemes to himself, merely observing, in the deepest despondency when the bottom had dropped out of them, “Wilhelmina, I fear that I have made a fool of myself again.” He sometimes earned a little money by writing, and I think might have earned more. He wrote stories of the most extreme sentimentality and of the most aggressively moral character; and one of the Sunday magazines used to publish them. He and I have screamed over them many a time. Shortly after one quarter-day he went down to a land auction in Essex and bought a small plot for ten pounds. When I remonstrated, he said feebly that an excellent free luncheon had been provided for all who attended the sale, and that, after all, much money had been made by poultry farming. I asked him if either he or I knew one single fact about poultry, except that they never laid as many eggs as one expected. He admitted it, and in a rare fit of remorse sat down at once and wrote a story about a girl with consumption which brought him in nearly enough to cover the difference between the price he had paid for the land and the price he sold it for a few days later. He was popular, as most extravagant men with a sense of humour are, but his sense of humour had a blind point. He could never see that any of his wild-cat business was utterly ridiculous, or understand why sometimes in the middle of our deepest distress I could not help laughing at him. Yet he did not take his literary work seriously at all, and it used to be my chief amusement to get him to read out his own stories, with his own parenthetical comments. His popularity certainly served him at some of the times of crisis, and made his creditors lenient with him. During his last illness several people to whom he owed money, and had owed money for a long time, sent him presents. I thought it was rather touching. We were living then at a village called Castel-on-Weld, and we lived there simply and solely because my father happened to come upon the name in an old Bradshaw, and thought that it would be nice and hereditary to be Bernard Castel, Esq., of Castel-on-Weld. I am not aware that any of his ancestors had ever lived within a hundred miles of the place.