ANDREW HOWLAND belonged to that class of rigid moralists who can
tolerate in others no wanderings from the right way. His children
were forced into the straight jacket of external consistency from
their earliest infancy; and if they deviated from the right line in
which they were required to walk, punishment was sure to follow.

A child loves his parent naturally. The latter may be harsh, and
unreasonable; still the child will look up to him in weak
dependence, while love mingles, like golden threads in a dark
fabric, amid the fear and respect with which he regards him. Thus it
was with the children of Andrew Howland. Their mother was a gentle,
retiring woman, with a heart full of the best affections. When the
sunshine fell upon her golden locks in the early days of innocence,
it was in a home where the ringing laugh, the merry shout, and the
wild exuberance of feeling ever bursting from the heart of childhood
were rarely checked; or, if repressed, with a hand that wounded not
in its firm contraction. She had grown up to womanhood amid all that
was gentle, kind and loving. Transplanted, then, like a tender
flower from a sunny border, to the cold and formal home of her
husband, she drooped in the uncongenial soil, down into which her
heart-fibres penetrated in search of nutrition. And yet, while
drooping thus, she tenderly loved her husband, and earnestly sought
to overcome in herself many true impulses of nature to which he gave
the false name of weaknesses. It was less painful thus to repress
them herself, than to have them crushed in the iron hand with which
he was ever ready to grasp them.

Let it not be thought that Andrew Howland was an evil minded man. In
the beginning we have intimated that this was not so. He purposed