s of those can be who have lived among the fumes and
vapours that rise in these low grounds, unless the eyes be washed day
by day in the spring of truth, and anointed with unearthly ointment.
The right and the wrong were the two things that presented themselves
to my view; and oh, my sorrow and heartbreak was, that papa was in the
wrong. I could not believe it, and yet I could not get rid of it.
There were oppressors and oppressed in the world; and _he_ was one of
the oppressors. There is no sorrow that a child can bear, keener and
more gnawingly bitter than this. It has a sting of its own, for which
there is neither salve nor remedy; and it had the aggravation, in my
case, of the sense of personal dishonour. The wrong done and the
oppression inflicted were not the whole; there was besides the
intolerable sense of living upon other's gains. It was more than my
heart could bear.

I could not write as I do--I could not recall these thoughts and that
time--if I had not another thought to bring to bear upon them; a
thought which at that time I was not able to comprehend. It came to me
later with its healing, and I have seen and felt it more clearly as I
grew older. I see it very clearly now. I had not been mistaken in my
childish notions of the loftiness and generosity of my father's
character. He was what I had thought him. Neither was I a whit wrong
in my judgment of the things which it grieved me that he did and
allowed. But I saw afterwards how he, and others, had grown up and
been educated in a system and atmosphere of falsehood, till he failed
to perceive that it was false. His eyes had lived in the darkness till
it seemed quite comfortably light to him; while to a fresh vision,
accustomed to the sun, it was pure and blank darkness, as thick as
night. He followed what others did and his father had done before him,
without any suspicion that it was an abnormal and morbid condition of
things they were all living in; more especially without a tinge of
misgiving that it might not be a noble, upright, dignified way of
life. But I, his little unreasoning child, bringing the golden rule of
the gospel only to judge of the doings of hell, shrank back and fell
to the ground, in my heart, to find the one I loved best in the world
concerned in them.

So when I opened my eyes that night, and looked into the blaze of the
firelight, the dark figures that were there before it stung me with
pain every time; and every soft word and t