f my readers, but it is a fact none the less, and
the saddest pity of it is that the glamor is most over those whose brains
are quick and responsive to all forms of noble emotions, all suggestions
of personal self-sacrifice; and if such later rise to the higher emotions
whose shadows have attracted them, and to that higher self-sacrifice
whose whispers reached them in their early youth, then the false
prophet's veil is raised, and the life is either wrecked, or through
storm-wind and surge of battling billows, with loss of mast and sail, is
steered by firm hand into the port of a higher creed.

My mother, Minnie, and I passed the summer holidays at St. Leonards, and
many a merry gallop had we over our favorite fields, I on a favorite
black mare, Gipsy Queen, as full of life and spirits as I was myself, who
danced gaily over ditch and hedge, thinking little of my weight, for I
rode barely eight stone. At the end of those, our last free summer
holidays, we returned as usual to Harrow, and shortly afterwards I went
to Switzerland with some dear friends of ours named Roberts.

Everyone about Manchester will remember Mr. Roberts, the solicitor, the
"poor man's lawyer". Close friend of Ernest Jones, and hand-in-hand with
him through all his struggles, Mr. Roberts was always ready to fight a
poor man's battle for him without fee, and to champion any worker
unfairly dealt with. He worked hard in the agitation which saved women
from working in the mines, and I have heard him tell how he had seen them
toiling, naked to the waist, with short petticoats barely reaching to
their knees, rough, foul-tongued, brutalised out of all womanly decency
and grace; and how he had seen little children working there too, babies
of three and four set to watch a door, and falling asleep at their work
to be roused by curse and kick to the unfair toil. The old man's eye
would begin to flash and his voice to rise as he told of these horrors,
and then his face would soften as he added that, after it was all over
and the slavery was put an end to, as he went through a coal-district the
women standing at their doors would lift up their children to see "Lawyer
Roberts" go by, and would bid "God bless him" for what he had done. This
dear old man was my first tutor in Radicalism, and I was an apt pupil. I
had taken no interest in politics, but had unconsciously reflected more
or less the decorous Whiggism which had always surrounded me. I regarded
"the poo