and ungovernable in proportion to the growing forces within him.

Of course she accepted him, with his grand physical advantages and
his good property. There was rivalry enough to excite him, her
beauty was sufficient to fire his boyish fancy; and opposition only
maddened his headstrong will. A loud, boisterous, self-willed boy,
with already strength, courage, and power beyond those of most grown
men; his inclination light and unformed, as the attachments of his
age usually are, was so backed that he succeeded where failure would
have been a blessing.

My poor brother Eustace! what must not Harold's marriage have been to
him! Into the common home, hitherto peaceful if mournful, was
brought this coarse, violent, uneducated woman, jealous of him and
his family, unmeasured in rudeness, contemning all the refinements to
which he clung, and which even then were second nature to the youths,
boasting over him for being a convict, whereas her father was a free
settler, and furious at any act of kindness or respect to him from
her husband.

She must have had a sort of animal jealousy, for the birth of her
first child rendered her so savagely intolerant of poor Dora's
fondness for Harold, that the offer of a clergyman's wife to take
charge of the little girl was thankfully accepted by her father,
though it separated him from his darling by more than fifty miles.

The woman's plan seemed to be to persecute the two Eustaces out of
her house, since she could not persuade Harold that it was not as
much theirs as his own. They clung on, as weak men do, for want of
energy to make a change, and Eustace said his father would never