of
generous nature, produced certain anomalies, hard for his children,
living in comparative wealth and ease, to interpret. His father, the
boy observed, was liberal to a fault in large matters, but scrupulously
and needlessly particular about small expenses. He would take the
children on a foreign tour, and then practise an elaborate species of
discomfort, in an earnest endeavour to save some minute disbursements.
He would give his son a magnificent book, and chide him because he cut
instead of untying the string of the parcel. Long after, the boy,
disentangling his father's early life in diaries and letters, would
wish, with a wistful regret, that he had only had the clue to this
earlier; he would have sympathised, he thought, with the idea that lay
beneath the little economies, instead of fretting over them, and
discussing them rebelliously with his sisters. His father was a man of
almost passionate affections; there was nothing in the world that he
more desired than the company and the sympathy of his children; but he
had, besides this, an intense and tremulous sense of responsibility
towards them. He attached an undue importance to small indications of
character; and thus the children were seldom at ease with their father,
because he rebuked them constantly, and found frequent fault, doing
almost violence to his tenderness, not from any pleasure in
censoriousness, but from a terror, that was almost morbid, of the
consequences of the unchecked development of minute tendencies.

Hugh's mother was of a very different disposition; she was fully as
affectionate as his father, but of a brighter, livelier, more facile
nature; she came of a wealthy family, and had never known the hard
discipline from which his father had suffered. She was a good many
years younger than her husband; they were united by the intensest
affection; but while she devoted herself to him with a perfect
understanding of, and sympathy with, his somewhat jealous and
puritanical nature, she did not escape the severity of his sense of
responsibility, and his natural instinct for attempting to draw those
nearest to him into the circle of his high, if rigid, standards. Long
afterwards, Hugh grew to discern a greater largeness and liberality in
her methods of dealing with life and other natures than his father had
displayed; and no shadow of any kind had ever clouded his love and
admiration for his mother; his love indeed could not have deepened; bu