m is limited to what I remember
as a mere child. Let me say something, however, first about my parents,
my sister and myself.

My sister was the eldest born and the best loved. I did not come into
the world till four years after her birth, and no other child followed
me. Caroline, from her earliest days, was the perfection of beauty and
health. I was small, weakly, and, if the truth must be told, almost
as plain-featured as Uncle George himself. It would be ungracious and
undutiful in me to presume to decide whether there was any foundation or
not for the dislike that my father's family always felt for my mother.
All I can venture to say is, that her children never had any cause to
complain of her.

Her passionate affection for my sister, her pride in the child's beauty,
I remember well, as also her uniform kindness and indulgence toward me.
My personal defects must have been a sore trial to her in secret,
but neither she nor my father ever showed me that they perceived any
difference between Caroline and myself. When presents were made to my
sister, presents were made to me. When my father and mother caught my
sister up in their arms and kissed her they scrupulously gave me my turn
afterward. My childish instinct told me that there was a difference in
their smiles when they looked at me and looked at her; that the kisses
given to Caroline were warmer than the kisses given to me; that the
hands which dried her tears in our childish griefs, touched her more
gently than the hands which dried mine. But these, and other small signs
of preference like them, were such as no parents could be expected
to control. I noticed them at the time rather with wonder than with
repining. I recall them now without a harsh thought either toward my
father or my mother. Both loved me, and both did their duty by me. If I
seem to speak constrainedly of them here, it is not on my own account. I
can honestly say that, with all my heart and soul.

Even Uncle George, fond as he was of me, was fonder of my beautiful
child-sister.

When I used mischievously to pull at his lank, scanty hair, he would
gently and laughingly take it out of my hands, but he would let Caroline
tug at it till his dim, wandering gray eyes winked and watered again
with pain. He used to plunge perilously about the garden, in awkward
imitation of the cantering of a horse, while I sat on his shoulders;
but he would never proceed at any pace beyond a slow and safe walk when