one of her sons "foolishly" spent his money in a multitude of charitable
hobbies; and that the other was constantly supplied with means for (the
mother was sorry to say it, vulgar) dissipation. By consequence, Charles
did more good, and Julian more evil, than I have time to stop and tell
off.

If any thing in this life must be personal, peculiar, and specific, it
is education: we take upon ourselves to speak thus dogmatically, not of
mere school-teaching only, _musa_, _musæ_, and so forth; nor yet of
lectures, on relative qualities of carbon and nitrogen in vegetables;
no, nor even of schemes of theology, or codes of morals; but we do speak
of the daily and hourly reining-in, or letting-out, of discouragement in
one appetite, and encouragement in another; of habitual formation of
characters in their diversity; and of shaping their bear's-cub, or that
child-angel, the natural human mind, to its destined ends; that it may
turn out, for good, according to its several natures, to be either the
strong-armed, bold-eyed, rough-hewer of God's grand designs, or the
delicate-fingered polisher of His rarest sculptures. Julian,
well-trained, might have grown to be a Luther; and many a gentle soul
like Charles, has turned out a coxcomb and a sensualist.

The boys were born, as I have said, in the regulation order of things, a
few months after Captain Tracy sailed away for India some full score of
years, and more, from this present hour, when we have seen him seated as
a general in the library at Burleigh; and, until the last year, they had
never seen their father--scarcely ever heard of him.

The incidents of their lives had been few and common-place: it would be
easy, but wearisome, to specify the orchards and the bee-hives which
Julian had robbed as a school-boy; the rebellions he had headed; the