r
was I to see her again for years. In November my mother and I went to
Jamaica, for I had so outgrown my strength that fresh and alarming
symptoms seemed to threaten me with more fatal ills than being merely
crippled for life. But their only effect was to banish us for two years
from all the familiar old scenes. We were never to go back to Belfield
again and find our home there. Youth and passionate emotion and the
thought of marriage had vanished now from my mother: she had, it
sometimes seemed to me, no other wish than that I should be restored to
health. I fancy she almost hated the memory of that brief time when the
words of Mr. Floyd made her color deepen, her lip tremble and the glad
impulsive tears start to her eyes.

I accepted her willing service and her exclusive love. I needed both,
God knows, in those days of weakness and pain. After a time I began to
mend: then I grew robust and strong. My lameness diminished, and was
comparatively cured, since I could dispense with crutch or stick.
Whether youth or the fine air of those beautiful tropical uplands
wrought the miracle, who shall say? Now, although I have the old limp,
which I shall carry with me to the grave, my misfortune has ceased to be
such to me: it is hard to feel that I was ever justified in regarding it
as a calamity to becloud my life. And my little daughter said to me the
other day, "I am so glad, papa, that you are lame, for I am sure to
catch you up, even if the boys run away from me."

All the more striking characteristics of my nature were changed by my
accident. I had suffered much in body and in mind, and had been refined
by the torture to a point which made me effeminate, since an almost
painful capacity for sympathy, an overwhelming dread of inflicting
suffering, and a somewhat morbid self-depreciation are qualities
scarcely masculine. My early ambition had been for a hard place in the
world, where the world's work would force me to give hard knocks before
I reached success. But now I shrank from the jostle and bustle and harsh
competitions of real life; and as both my mother and Mr. Floyd wished
nothing so much as that I should be guarded from all effort and fatigue
at this epoch, everything conspired to unfit me for an active career,
and to make me a mere looker-on--not a worker, but a musing,
disappointed spectator.

But when I was about eighteen I returned and entered the junior year at
college with Jack Holt and Harry Dart. I had f