become celebrated. He was an orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance
while he pursued the medical studies for which he had a special genius.
Strange! that with my vague mind, susceptible and unobservant, hating
inquiry and given up to contemplation, I should have been drawn towards a
youth whose strongest passion was science. But the bond was not an
intellectual one; it came from a source that can happily blend the stupid
with the brilliant, the dreamy with the practical: it came from community
of feeling. Charles was poor and ugly, derided by Genevese _gamins_, and
not acceptable in drawing-rooms. I saw that he was isolated, as I was,
though from a different cause, and, stimulated by a sympathetic
resentment, I made timid advances towards him. It is enough to say that
there sprang up as much comradeship between us as our different habits
would allow; and in Charles's rare holidays we went up the Saleve
together, or took the boat to Vevay, while I listened dreamily to the
monologues in which he unfolded his bold conceptions of future experiment
and discovery. I mingled them confusedly in my thought with glimpses of
blue water and delicate floating cloud, with the notes of birds and the
distant glitter of the glacier. He knew quite well that my mind was half
absent, yet he liked to talk to me in this way; for don't we talk of our
hopes and our projects even to dogs and birds, when they love us? I have
mentioned this one friendship because of its connexion with a strange and
terrible scene which I shall have to narrate in my subsequent life.

This happier life at Geneva was put an end to by a severe illness, which
is partly a blank to me, partly a time of dimly-remembered suffering,
with the presence of my father by my bed from time to time. Then came
the languid monotony of convalescence, the days gradually breaking into
variety and distinctness as my strength enabled me to take longer and
longer drives. On one of these more vividly remembered days, my father
said to me, as he sat beside my sofa--