te the sunshine of this love of brother and sister, which
continued during life--confidential, earnest, tender, frank. In their best
moods they were both lofty souls, and their mutuality was cemented in a
contempt for the man who was their sire. This fine brotherly and sisterly
affection comes close to us when we remember that it was our own Harriet
Beecher Stowe, with sympathies worn to the quick through much brooding
over the wrongs of a race in bondage, who rushed into print with a
scandalous accusation concerning this same sweet affection of brother for
sister. The charge was brought on no better foundation than some old-woman
gossip held over the hyson when it was red, and moved itself aright--all
vouchsafed to Mrs. Stowe by the widow of Byron in Eighteen Hundred
Fifty-six. If a woman as good at heart as Harriet Beecher Stowe was
deceived, why should we blame humanity for biting at a hook that is not
baited?

No sane dentist will administer an anesthetic to a woman, without a
witness: not that women as a class are dangerous, but because some women
can not be trusted to distinguish between their dreams and the facts.
Every practising lawyer of insight also knows that a wronged woman's
reasons are plentiful as blackberries, and must always be taken with
large pinches of the Syracuse product.

Mad Jack followed his regiment here and there, dodging his creditors, and
finally in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-one induced his wife to borrow a
hundred pounds for him, with which he started to Paris intent on
retrieving fortune with pasteboard.

He died on the way, and the money was used to bury him. The lame boy was
then three years old, but a few dark memories, no doubt retouched by
hearsay, were retained by him of Mad Jack, who in his most sober moments
never guessed that he would be known to the ages as the father of the
greatest poet of his time.

Mad Jack was neither literary nor psychic.

The widowed mother remained at Aberdeen with her boy, living on the
hundred and fifty pounds a year that had been settled on her in a way that
she could not squander the principal--all the rest had gone.

The child was shy, sensitive, proud and headstrong.

The mother used to reprove him by throwing things at him, and by chasing
him with the tongs. At other times she diverted herself by imitating his
limp. And yet again she would smother him with caresses, beseech his
pardon for abusing him, and praise the beauty of his matchless e