and
guinea confinements, so that both the governor and I have had plenty
to do. You know how I admire him, and yet I fear there is little
intellectual sympathy between us. He appears to think that those
opinions of mine upon religion and politics which come hot from my
inmost soul have been assumed either out of indifference or bravado. So
I have ceased to talk on vital subjects with him, and, though we affect
to ignore it, we both know that there is a barrier there. Now, with my
mother--ah, but my mother must have a paragraph to herself.

You met her, Bertie! You must remember her sweet face, her sensitive
mouth, her peering, short-sighted eyes, her general suggestion of a
plump little hen, who is still on the alert about her chickens. But you
cannot realise all that she is to me in our domestic life. Those helpful
fingers! That sympathetic brain! Ever since I can remember her she has
been the quaintest mixture of the housewife and the woman of letters,
with the highbred spirited lady as a basis for either character. Always
a lady, whether she was bargaining with the butcher, or breaking in a
skittish charwoman, or stirring the porridge, which I can see her doing
with the porridge-stick in one hand, and the other holding her Revue
des deux Mondes within two inches of her dear nose. That was always her
favourite reading, and I can never think of her without the association
of its browny-yellow cover.

She is a very well-read woman is the mother; she keeps up to date in
French literature as well as in English, and can talk by the hour about
the Goncourts, and Flaubert, and Gautier. Yet she is always hard at
work; and how she imbibes all her knowledge is a mystery. She reads when
she knits, she reads when she scrubs, she even reads when she feeds
her babies. We have a little joke against her, that at an interesting
passage she deposited a spoonful of rusk and milk into my little
sister's car-hole, the child having turned her head at the critical
instant. Her hands are worn with work, and yet where is the idle woman
who has read as much?

Then, there is her family pride. That is a very vital portion of the
mother. You know how little I think of such things. If the Esquire were
to be snipped once and for ever from the tail of my name I should be
the lighter for it. But, ma foi!--to use her own favourite expletive--it
would not do to say this to her. On the Packenham side (she is a
Packenham) the family can boast of some