for a time in silence, and found here a question too
great for my small brain.

"But was he right?" I asked at last, falling back upon my companion's
greater knowledge.

"It is hard to say," he answered softly. "Perhaps he was, and yet I have
come to think there is little to choose between one sect and another, so
Christ be in them and the man honest."

He looked out across the fields with tender eyes and I slipped my hand
in his. A vision of her sad face danced before me and I fell asleep, my
head within his arm, to waken only when he lifted me down at our
journey's end.

All this came back to me with the vividness which childish recollections
sometimes have, as I sat there in the pew at my mother's side. Only I
could not quite believe that this little wrinkled old man was the same
who looked so proudly from Kneller's canvas. But when the service ended
and he stopped to exchange a word with father, I saw the face was indeed
the same, though now writ over sadly by the hand of time weighted down
with sorrow. It was the only time I ever saw him in the flesh, for he was
near the end and died soon after. He was buried beside his daughter in
the little graveyard near his home. It was Mr. Fontaine who closed his
eyes in hope of resurrection and spoke the last words above his grave,--
beloved in this great mansion as in the lowliest cabin at Charles City.

My pen would fain linger over the portrait of this sainted man, which is
the fairest and most benign in the whole gallery of my youth, but I must
turn to another subject,--to the cloud which began to shadow my life at
my tenth year, and which still shadows it to-day. For the first six or
seven years of their married life my father and mother were, I believe,
wholly and unaffectedly happy. When I think of them now, I think of them
only as they were during that time, and wonder how many of the married
people about me could say as much. Their means were small, and they lived
a quiet life, which had few luxuries. But as time went on, my father
began to chafe at the petty economies which the smallness of their income
rendered necessary. He had been bred amid the luxuries of a great estate,
where the house was open to every passer-by, and it vexed him that he
could not now show the same wide hospitality. I think he yet had hopes of
succeeding to his father's estate, out of which, indeed, there was no law
in Virginia to keep him should he choose to claim it. Whatever his
thoug