body in the ground. I suppose that my emotion was spent at
the time, and so there was nothing to fix that moment in my
memory.

'I did not then, nor do I now, find any beauty in these
ceremonies. What had they to do with the sweet playful child?
Her life and death were alike beautiful, but all this sad
parade was not. Thus my first experience of life was one of
death. She who would have been the companion of my life was
severed from me, and I was left alone. This has made a
vast difference in my lot. Her character, if that fair face
promised right, would have been soft, graceful and lively: it
would have tempered mine to a gentler and more gradual course.




OVERWORK.


'My father,--all whose feelings were now concentred on
me,--instructed me himself. The effect of this was so far good
that, not passing through the hands of many ignorant and weak
persons as so many do at preparatory schools, I was put at
once under discipline of considerable severity, and, at the
same time, had a more than ordinarily high standard presented
to me. My father was a man of business, even in literature; he
had been a high scholar at college, and was warmly attached
to all he had learned there, both from the pleasure he had
derived in the exercise of his faculties and the associated