ad emigrated to Australia in 1851, and had
amassed great wealth. We knew of his existence, but there had been no
intercourse between him and my father, and we did not even know that he
was rich and unmarried. He died intestate towards the end of 1885, and
my father was the only relative he had, except, of course, myself, for
both my father's sisters had died young, and without leaving children.

The solicitor through whom the news reached us was, happily, a man of the
highest integrity, and also very sensible and kind. He was a Mr. Alfred
Emery Cathie, of 15 Clifford's Inn, E.C., and my father placed himself
unreservedly in his hands. I was at once sent to a first-rate school,
and such pains had my father taken with me that I was placed in a higher
form than might have been expected considering my age. The way in which
he had taught me had prevented my feeling any dislike for study; I
therefore stuck fairly well to my books, while not neglecting the games
which are so important a part of healthy education. Everything went well
with me, both as regards masters and school-fellows; nevertheless, I was
declared to be of a highly nervous and imaginative temperament, and the
school doctor more than once urged our headmaster not to push me forward
too rapidly--for which I have ever since held myself his debtor.

Early in 1890, I being then home from Oxford (where I had been entered in
the preceding year), my mother died; not so much from active illness, as
from what was in reality a kind of _maladie du pays_. All along she had
felt herself an exile, and though she had borne up wonderfully during my
father's long struggle with adversity, she began to break as soon as
prosperity had removed the necessity for exertion on her own part.

My father could never divest himself of the feeling that he had wrecked
her life by inducing her to share her lot with his own; to say that he
was stricken with remorse on losing her is not enough; he had been so
stricken almost from the first year of his marriage; on her death he was
haunted by the wrong he accused himself--as it seems to me very
unjustly--of having done her, for it was neither his fault nor hers--it
was Ate.

His unrest soon assumed the form of a burning desire to revisit the
country in which he and my mother had been happier together than perhaps
they ever again were. I had often heard him betray a hankering after a
return to Erewhon, disguised so that no one should re