emories,
buried in its depths like those marine productions seen in calmest
weather and which the storms of ocean cast in fragments on the
shore.

The mental labor which the expression of ideas necessitates has
revived the old, old feelings which give me so much pain when they
come suddenly; and if in this confession of my past they break
forth in a way that wounds you, remember that you threatened to
punish me if I did not obey your wishes, and do not, therefore,
punish my obedience. I would that this, my confidence, might
increase your love.

Until we meet,

Felix.

CHAPTER I. TWO CHILDHOODS

To what genius fed on tears shall we some day owe that most touching of
all elegies,--the tale of tortures borne silently by souls whose tender
roots find stony ground in the domestic soil, whose earliest buds are
torn apart by rancorous hands, whose flowers are touched by frost at the
moment of their blossoming? What poet will sing the sorrows of the child
whose lips must suck a bitter breast, whose smiles are checked by the
cruel fire of a stern eye? The tale that tells of such poor hearts,
oppressed by beings placed about them to promote the development of
their natures, would contain the true history of my childhood.

What vanity could I have wounded,--I a child new-born? What moral or
physical infirmity caused by mother's coldness? Was I the child of
duty, whose birth is a mere chance, or was I one whose very life was
a reproach? Put to nurse in the country and forgotten by my family for
over three years, I was treated with such indifference on my return to
the parental roof that even the servants pitied me. I do not know to
what feeling or happy accident I owed my rescue from this first neglect;
as a child I was ignorant of it, as a man I have not discovered it. Far
from easing my lot, my brother and my two sisters found amusement in
making me suffer. The compact in virtue of which children hide each
other's peccadilloes, and which early teaches them the principles
of honor, was null and void in my case; more than that, I was often
punished for my brother's faults, without being allowed to prove the
injustice. The fawning spirit which seems instinctive in children
taught my brother and sisters to join in the persecutions to which I was
subjected, and thus keep in the good graces of a mother whom they
feared as much as I. Was this partly the effect of a childish love of
imitation; was