a being so rudimentary and feeble as a little
child could be. My Mother, in her last hours, had dwelt on our
unity in God; we were drawn together, she said, elect from the
world, in a triplicity of faith and joy. She had constantly
repeated the words: 'We shall be one family, one song. One song!
one family!' My Father, I think, accepted this as a prophecy, he
felt no doubt of our triple unity; my Mother had now merely
passed before us, through a door, into a world of light, where we
should presently join her, where all things would be radiant and
blissful, but where we three would, in some unknown way, be
particularly drawn together in a tie of inexpressible beatitude.
He fretted at the delay; he would have taken me by the hand, and
have joined her in the realms of holiness and light, at once,
without this dreary dalliance with earthly cares.

He held this confidence and vision steadily before him, but
nothing availed against the melancholy of his natural state. He
was conscious of his dull and solitary condition, and he saw,
too, that it enveloped me. I think his heart was, at this time,
drawn out towards me in an immense tenderness. Sometimes, when
the early twilight descended upon us in the study, and he could
no longer peer with advantage into the depths of his microscope,
he would beckon me to him silently, and fold me closely in his
arms. I used to turn my face up to his, patiently and
wonderingly, while the large, unwilling tears gathered in the
corners of his eyelids. My training had given me a preternatural
faculty of stillness, and we would stay so, without a word or a
movement, until the darkness filled the room. And then, with my
little hand in his, we would walk sedately downstairs to the
parlour, where we would find that the lamp was lighted, and that
our melancholy vigil was ended. I do not think that at any part
of our lives my Father and I were drawn so close to one another
as we were in that summer of 1857. Yet we seldom spoke of what
lay so warm and fragrant between us, the flower-like thought of
our Departed.

The visit to my cousins had made one considerable change in me.
Under the old solitary discipline, my intelligence had grown at
the expense of my sentiment. I was innocent, but inhuman. The
long suffering and the death of my Mother had awakened my heart,
had taught me what pain was, but had left me savage and morose. I
had still no idea of the relations of human beings to one
another; I h