compunction at having made a fortune. He remembered that the fruit had
not dropped ripe from the tree into his own mouth, and determined it
should be no fault of his if the boy was corrupted by luxury. Rowland,
therefore, except for a good deal of expensive instruction in foreign
tongues and abstruse sciences, received the education of a poor man's
son. His fare was plain, his temper familiar with the discipline of
patched trousers, and his habits marked by an exaggerated simplicity
which it really cost a good deal of money to preserve unbroken. He was
kept in the country for months together, in the midst of servants who
had strict injunctions to see that he suffered no serious harm, but
were as strictly forbidden to wait upon him. As no school could be found
conducted on principles sufficiently rigorous, he was attended at home
by a master who set a high price on the understanding that he was to
illustrate the beauty of abstinence not only by precept but by example.
Rowland passed for a child of ordinary parts, and certainly, during his
younger years, was an excellent imitation of a boy who had inherited
nothing whatever that was to make life easy. He was passive,
pliable, frank, extremely slow at his books, and inordinately fond of
trout-fishing. His hair, a memento of his Dutch ancestry, was of
the fairest shade of yellow, his complexion absurdly rosy, and his
measurement around the waist, when he was about ten years old, quite
alarmingly large. This, however, was but an episode in his growth; he
became afterwards a fresh-colored, yellow-bearded man, but he was never
accused of anything worse than a tendency to corpulence. He emerged from
childhood a simple, wholesome, round-eyed lad, with no suspicion that a
less roundabout course might have been taken to make him happy, but with
a vague sense that his young experience was not a fair sample of human
freedom, and that he was to make a great many discoveries. When he was
about fifteen, he achieved a momentous one. He ascertained that his
mother was a saint. She had always been a very distinct presence in his