"My mother was an exceptionally thoughtful and broad-minded woman--more advanced, on most subjects, than where they stand now--a vivid and vital being, of great vivacity, gladness (that never was levity) and conversational powers, with a gift for the interchange of ideas (which is not, by any means, always the same thing). She was also a poet, as her little volume of collected pieces, 'Words without Music' (a modest title) testifies, at least to myself. She had joyous 'L'Allegro'-like country instincts, a deep inborn love of the beauties of nature (which she sketched charmingly), and great feeling for, and interest in both plant and animal _life_. I underline that word, in its last connection, because killing was quite another thing for her, and her whole soul shrank away from it. But of course, as you know, what, in root and origin, may be the same, is often differentiated in the sexes, and so inherited by each. It was, I think, undoubtedly through our mother (though he did not, personally, much resemble either parent) that my brother inherited everything that made him distinctively himself. By this I mean that though much and that the best--as, for instance, his patriotism and love of truth--may have come to him from both sides, and some from the other only, it was that one that gave to it, and the whole, its original life-shaping turn. The whole was included in the blood of the Bruces of Clackmannan, representative, I believe, of the elder branch of the family that gave Robert Bruce to the throne of Scotland, but what exact position, in our family tree, is occupied by Bruce, the Abyssinian explorer, I do not quite know. However, he must have been some sort of ancestor of my brother, and Bruce, since the intermingling, has been a family name, though not given to any of us surviving infancy, owing to an idea which had arisen, through several instances of such association, that it had become unlucky. In this regard, it has been rather the patronymic, which, from one war to another, has borne the malevolent influence. None have come back, either wounded, invalided or at all. All killed outright--but this by the way. Had it not been for my mother, therefore, my brother, in all probability, would either never, or not in any preponderating degree, have felt the 'call of the wild,' for my father not only never felt it, but never was able to comprehend the feeling. There was, in fact, nothing at all in him of what was my brother's life and being. He was, in the proper evolutionary sense of the word, essentially a civilized man and a Londoner. Sport was, for him, an unknown (and much disliked) quantity, and though taking, in an air-tight-compartment sort of way, some interest in insects, he had not much about him of the real naturalist.