I had a complaint of the eyes that made me blind for a little while, and
she kept me on her knee from morning till night. That unequalled love
soon vanished out of my life, and even to my childish consciousness it
was as if that life had become more chill I rode my little white pony
with the groom by my side as before, but there were no loving eyes
looking at me as I mounted, no glad arms opened to me when I came back.
Perhaps I missed my mother's love more than most children of seven or
eight would have done, to whom the other pleasures of life remained as
before; for I was certainly a very sensitive child. I remember still the
mingled trepidation and delicious excitement with which I was affected by
the tramping of the horses on the pavement in the echoing stables, by the
loud resonance of the groom's voices, by the booming bark of the dogs as
my father's carriage thundered under the archway of the courtyard, by the
din of the gong as it gave notice of luncheon and dinner. The measured
tramp of soldiery which I sometimes heard--for my father's house lay near
a county town where there were large barracks--made me sob and tremble;
and yet when they were gone past, I longed for them to come back again.

I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for
me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a
parent's duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was
not his only son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-
and-forty when he married her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely
orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of
the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people
who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by
the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him in
great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at
other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the
intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one