I hurried back from Brussels to Bruges on my way to London, and
found that the number of invalids had been increased. My younger
sister, Emily, who, when I had left the house, was trembling on
the balance,--who had been pronounced to be delicate, but with that
false-tongued hope which knows the truth, but will lie lest the
heart should faint, had been called delicate, but only delicate,--was
now ill. Of course she was doomed. I knew it of both of them,
though I had never heard the word spoken, or had spoken it to any
one. And my father was very ill,--ill to dying, though I did not
know it. And my mother had decreed to send my elder sister away to
England, thinking that the vicinity of so much sickness might be
injurious to her. All this happened late in the autumn of 1834, in
the spring of which year we had come to Bruges; and then my mother
was left alone in a big house outside the town, with two Belgian
women-servants, to nurse these dying patients--the patients being
her husband and children--and to write novels for the sustenance
of the family! It was about this period of her career that her best
novels were written.

To my own initiation at the Post Office I will return in the next
chapter. Just before Christmas my brother died, and was buried at
Bruges. In the following February my father died, and was buried
alongside of him,--and with him died that tedious task of his,
which I can only hope may have solaced many of his latter hours. I
sometimes look back, meditating for hours together, on his adverse
fate. He was a man, finely educated, of great parts, with immense
capacity for work, physically strong very much beyond the average
of men, addicted to no vices, carried off by no pleasures, affectionate
by nature, most anxious for the welfare of his children, born to