n up in an order of his own; all thoroughly mastered and
known; among them David Hume's copy of Shaftesbury's _Characteristics_,
with his autograph, which he had picked up at some stall.

I have said that my mother's death was the second epoch in my father's
life. I should perhaps have said the third; the first being his mother's
long illness and death, and the second his going to Elie, and beginning
the battle of life at fifteen. There must have been something very
delicate and close and exquisite in the relation between the ailing,
silent, beautiful, and pensive mother, and that dark-eyed, dark-haired,
bright and silent son; a sort of communion it is not easy to express.
You can think of him at eleven slowly writing out that small book of
promises in a distinct and minute hand, quite as like his mature hand,
as the shy, lustrous-eyed boy was to his after-self in his manly years,
and sitting by the bedside while the rest were out and shouting, playing
at hide-and-seek round the little church, with the winds from Benlomond
or the wild uplands of Ayrshire blowing through their hair. He played
seldom, but when he did run out, he jumped higher and farther, and ran
faster than any of them. His peculiar beauty must have come from his
mother. He used at rare times, and with a sort of shudder, to tell of
her when a lovely girl of fifteen, having been seen by a gentleman of
rank, in Cheapside, hand in hand with an evil woman, who was decoying
her to ruin, on pretence of showing her the way home; and how he stopped
his carriage and taking in the unconscious girl, drove her to her
uncle's door. But you have said all this better than I can.

His time with his mother, and the necessary confinement and bodily
depression caused by it, I doubt not deepened his native thoughtful
turn, and his tendency to meditative melancholy, as a condition under
which he viewed all things, and quickened and intensified his sense of
the suffering of this world, and of the profound seriousness and mystery
in the midst of which we live and die.

The second epoch was that of his leaving home with his guinea, the last
he ever got from any one but himself; and his going among utter
strangers to be master of a school one half of the scholars of which
were bigger and older than himself, and all rough colts--wilful and
unbroken. This was his first fronting of the world. Besides supporting
himself, this knit the sinews of his mind, and made him rely on himsel